Barbara Misztal

Barbara Misztal
University of Leicester | LE · Department of Media and Communication

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97
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Publications

Publications (97)
Article
The paper argues that if imagination is paramount for sociology’s status and if literary intuition is a source of such imagination, we should rethink the value of literary insight for social analyses. It reviews the changing relationship between literature and sociology and shows how sociology can draw from literature as a starting point for unders...
Article
This article argues that our understanding of the complexity of the links between memory and migration can be enhanced by focusing on the role of experience in lending meaning to migrants’ lives. Realizing the difficulties of providing a comprehensive sociological account of experience and recognizing the potential of works of fiction to enrich soc...
Article
Full-text available
This paper asserts that the growing expansion of the micro realm of social activity calls for the exploration of everyday experience, seen as ranging from the most extraordinary to the most ordinary. The paper focuses on two constitutive features of the ordinary type of experience, namely, normality and boredom. It conceptualizes normality as an ou...
Article
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the theoretical and empirical understandings of the role that political forgiveness plays in the post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies. The paper provides a discussion of the complexities of the concept of political forgiveness, and offers empirical examples that demonstrate the different capacitie...
Book
Multiple Normalities: Making Sense of Ways of Living enhances sociological understandings of normality by illustrating it with the help of British novels. Barbara A. Misztal conceptualizes the notion of normality as the frame through which people see and interpret their particular historical circumstances. Assuming that literature constitutes a kin...
Chapter
This chapter’s aim is to dissect images of normality from the novels of the second analysed period, which covers the years from 1990 to 2010. While searching for similarities between the novels of that period in terms of their dominant vision of what is normality, it became clear that the main common feature is not the transgression of the solidity...
Chapter
The aim of this chapter is to analyse differences in all the novels’ images of normality. Therefore, here I am concerned with the notion of normality as a historical concept. Although I am not using literature as primary sociological evidence, in order to benefit from the literary insight the novels’ portrayals cannot be dissociated from the prevai...
Chapter
One of the most interesting promises of sociology, according to C. Wright Mills (1959), lies in its ability to connect private troubles and public issues. An improved sociological grasp of the concept of normality could, I believe, illustrate the value of, and challenges faced by, such an undertaking. Informed by Goffman’s position, which conceptua...
Chapter
The importance of novels as a source of sociological material and the links between literature and sociology have been raised and discussed for many decades. As Lepenies notes in Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, through the nineteenth century literature and sociology’contested with one another the claim to offer the key orient...
Chapter
Since the 1960s, sociology has started to view normality as ordinary, mundane daily routines, and its attempts to clarify the rules governing patterns and habits of everyday life focus on how to find a balance between social interactions and regulation. Subsequent studies of the routines of everyday life were not interested in the provision of prac...
Chapter
I started this project thinking about Mills’s (1959) identification of sociology’s task with that of the translation of personal troubles into public issues, and believing that sociology can profit from using works of realistic fiction since ‘[n]ovels are sociology to the extent that their authors make them’ (Runciman 1985: 21, italics in original)...
Chapter
This chapter’s main focus is on the similarities in all the novels’ images of normality. In Chapter 7 I will be concerned with differences in the novels’ representations of normality, thus aiming to expose the connections between the images of normality and the actual significant changes between the two historical periods being analysed. Taking int...
Chapter
From sociology’s beginnings in the nineteenth century, its task has been to solve the problem of a disordered society and to establish harmony and unity; that is, orderly normality: Sociology has, from its origins, been defined by its various conceptions of social life. These have attempted to make sense of those regularities of behavior that sugge...
Chapter
This chapter’s aim is to present images of normality that surfaced from the novels of the first analysed period (the 1950s and 1960s). After reading and scrutinizing the novels for their dominant representations of what is normality, what emerged as the common feature of the novels is their presentation of various ways of confronting the solidity o...
Conference Paper
The paper asserts that presently – as a result of the growing importance of networks of interconnected relationships, the complexity of the system and the innovative use of knowledge as sources of productivity gains - there is an increasing demand for cooperation. The paper critically evaluates theories that assume that today’s society increasing d...
Conference Paper
The paper aims to enrich the existing reflection on the political role of public intellectuals by exploring the impact of the changing nature of the political and intellectual spheres on their potential to connect with an audience. It argues that the significance of public intellectuals’ influence in the political arena is determined by their abili...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of the paper is to present a largely present unknown contribution of Jane Addams, one of America’s first female sociologists and the first American women to receive the Nobel Prize, to sociology of memory. It analyses Addams’s book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1917) where she directly addressed the issues of memory, its functions and th...
Article
The aim of this article is to bring to social theorists’ attention the growing visibility of the notion of dignity within human rights legislation, bioethics and public discourse generally, as well as to evaluate this term’s potential to enhance our capacities to respond to old and new challenges. The article starts with a short presentation of the...
Article
The paper critically evaluates the thesis of the interchangeability between the think-tank public intellectual and the academic public intellectual. It suggests that this thesis, while endorsing the rise of the think-tank public intellectual, pronounces the salience of the intellectual-social critic and undermines the authority of academic public i...
Article
This paper will contribute to the debate on reconciliation by enhancing the understanding of the relationship between forgiveness and trust, memory and justice. Until several decades ago forgiveness was ‘deemed unrealistic and inadmissible in the public realm’. Now, with a political fashion for apologies, forgiveness is seen as the essential condit...
Article
The paper offers a conceptual analysis of the relationship between trust and vulnerability. It argues that sorting out the meaning of both terms and developing further our understanding how they are connected are one of the important tasks of the social science. Trust is usually defined as confidence that partners will not exploit each others’ vuln...
Chapter
This chapter seeks to explore how to challenge the vulnerability associated with the unpredictability of actions. Its three sections, by examining the role of interpersonal relations of support and institutional ways in which we are protected from economic, social and other risks, will debate the possibility of expanding and improving ways to reduc...
Chapter
As we have illustrated in Chapter 1, the recent development in disaster studies and the growth of vulnerability science have contributed to the growing interest in the notion of vulnerability within the social sciences generally The impact of the hazard literature has been particularly visible in American sociology where the notion of vulnerability...
Chapter
The book has been written with a number of aims and objectives in mind. First, I am concerned to clarify and conceptualize the notion of vulnerability which is increasingly employed in public discourses and political life generally Arguing that existing approaches to vulnerability do not capture the depth of people’s experience of it and trying to...
Chapter
The main aim of the second part of this book is to offer examples of the practical workings of challenges to vulnerability. Since in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 we argued that the remedies for the three types of vulnerability are all trust-related mechanisms, the study of the relationship between trust and vulnerability is an essential step in the process...
Chapter
In this chapter, by examining some practical ways of challenging the first type of vulnerability (dependence), we illustrate how taking up responsibility contributes to the construction of bonds of solidarity Seeing the social world as ‘organised by allocations of responsibilities’ (Montada 2001: 89), we will analyse acts of responsibility at the t...
Chapter
The first form of vulnerability, which is rooted in the fundamental dependency of human beings, can be defined in terms of ‘the goods or things one values and whose care one partially entrusts to someone else, who has some discretion over him or her’ (Baier 1986: 235). To say that one person is particularly vulnerable to another is to say that ‘his...
Chapter
It is now very timely to begin the process of theorizing vulnerability as the mass media, politicians and academics increasingly use this term to signify the importance of the fragile, insecure and contingent nature of modern living. The proliferation of the notion of vulnerability seems to reflect a new sense of risk. Paradoxically, this greater a...
Chapter
The third form of vulnerability is based in the irreversibility of past actions and experiences and is connected with the fact that we cannot free ourselves from the consequences of past traumas, sufferings or wrongdoings (Arendt 1958: 238). The predicament of irreversibility endows an ordinary life with past pains and suffering, and so limits our...
Chapter
As we have pointed out in the Introduction, one would be hard pressed not to notice the increasing popularity of the term ‘vulnerability’ in all spheres of public discourse and within academia. Arguing that a better understanding of vulnerability is essential if progress is to be made in societal well-being, scholars from numerous disciplines explo...
Chapter
Forgiveness, as we discussed in Chapter 5, puts ‘an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly’ (Arendt 1958: 241), so it maybe be beneficial under some conditions and in some situations. Although past misdeeds cannot be undone in any literal sense, yet, by forgiving, we reject the power of the past to determine the present. F...
Chapter
The second form of vulnerability underscores our uncertainty about the future and manifests itself as an ‘infinite improbability’ of action (Arendt 1958: 245). While the first form of vulnerability is viewed from the angle of interdependence between people, the second form of vulnerability is associated with the unpredictability of human experience...
Book
Proposing an aggregative conception of vulnerability, this book provides a new framework for understanding individual experience of, and resilience to, vulnerability and promotes the need to find remedies for exposure to involuntary dependence, the unsecured future and the painful past.
Article
This paper adds to Hyvärinen's (this issue) argument that narrative interest emerged from many separate incentives and sources in the social sciences. I expand his claim by suggesting that the rise of ‘the narrative turn’ has been helped by the popularity of the concept of collective memory across the humanities and social sciences, and that a furt...
Article
This article argues that attempts to conceptualize the memory boom in amnesic societies have resulted in a clash between two theoretical stands: the approach which stresses the significance of remembering and the perspective which insists on the value of forgetting. It asserts that neither the value of memory nor the value of forgetting can be take...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of the paper is to present unusual achievements of three women sociologists who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Its goal is also to contribute to a long standing discussion of the role sociologists as public intellectuals. By focusing on Addams, Balch and Myrdal’s scholarly and public life, the paper demonstrates what social scientists can offer...
Article
This paper's purpose is to exam Turner's (2006a) thesis that Britain neither produced its own public intellectuals nor a distinctive sociology. It aims to outline difficulties with the logic of Turner's argument rather than to discuss any particular public intellectual in Britain. The paper argues that Turner's claim about the comparative insignifi...
Article
Creativity and civil courage are major dimensions of an intellectual's authority and contribute towards the enrichment of democracy. This book, first published in 2007, develops a sociological account of civil courage and creative behaviour in order to enhance our understanding of the nature of intellectuals' involvement in society. Barbara A. Misz...
Article
Arguing that the fruitful approach to a reworking of the social depends upon forging an alliance between sociological theory and feminist theory, the paper analyses strands in sociological thinking which are responsible for renewed interest in the 'social'. The first perspective, as developed by Touraine, Urry, Bauman and Castells, formulates a new...
Article
This article reconstructs and evaluates prevalent assumptions in the literature about links between collective memory and democracy. There are widespread assertions that memory is important for democratic community to achieve its potential, avoid dangers of past crimes, and secure its continuation. These assertions assume collective memory as a con...
Article
This paper argues that the continuing influence of the Durkheimian tradition in the sociology of memory has left us with three negative legacies. The first weakness of the Durkheimian perspective is its neglect of the question how individual consciousness might relate to group memory and its exclusive focus on the collective nature of social consci...
Article
This article argues that today’s search for identity, in the context of the rise of a new spirituality and the decline of authoritative memories, facilitates the forging of a new connection between soul and memory and enhances the importance of traumatic memories. Consequently, we witness the sacralization of memory which in unsettled times, when m...
Article
The paper develops an argument that the growing complexity of information and the widespread distrust of such information have created a need for a new foundation for the development of political action and that this demand has recently been satisfied with the help of the human rights discourse. On the surface of it, the global public's ability to...
Article
Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998) examines and compares communities of intellectuals linked as networks in ancient and medieval China and India, medieval and modern Japan, ancient Greece, medieval Islam and Judaism, medieval Christendom and modern Europe. The book has been the subject of m...
Article
The paper argues that although Durkheim did not explicitly employ the notion of collective memory, his approach offers a very insightful understanding of the need for historical continuity. Durkheim's belief that every society displays and requires a sense of continuity with the past and that the past confers identity on individuals and groups allo...
Article
The article examines changes in memory narratives in modern societies and the implications of new types of media for the production of memories in the global culture. The article also analyses the contribution of television to the construction of memory narratives – as sources of social identity, and the new media-generated ‘instant identities’. It...
Article
The article asserts that Goffman's concept of normality comes close to the notion of trust as a protective mechanism that prevents chaos and disorder by providing us with feelings of safety, certainty, and familiarity. Arguing that to account for the tendency of social order to be seen as normal we need to conceptualize trust as the routine backgro...
Article
The new popularity of the concept of normality demands a rethinking of the usefulness of the idea. The notion of normal was introduced to sociology by August Comte who borrowed the word "normal" from pathology and identified it with order and progress. Comte's evaluative idea of the normal social form and his coupling of "normal" with pathological,...
Article
The current deficit of trust in the working of democracy has been attracting the increasing attention of social scientists. Nevertheless, there is still a conspicuous lack of an integrative theory of trust. Existing literature is united in its recognition that the preferable democratic order should be rooted in trust relations. This assertion that...
Article
The article asserts that a search for truth ought to be carrying out in such a way as to preserve or enhance solidarity. It demonstrates the necessity and the difficulties of making atrocious and traumatic historical events legally accountable. The necessity and difficulties have been recently fuelled by the trends towards the openness of modern id...
Article
By looking at the history of the Polish lustration — the policy of checking the past of candidates for important positions — this article argues that although the lustration law has been finally passed at the end of 1998, Poland's dealing with the past is still full of unresolved and deeply ambivalent problems due to the nature of its postcommunist...
Article
The principal argument advanced in this essay pertains to the social, collective, and indeed generation-embedded nature of critical social knowledge production. Critical theory has been developed in the West, and among the American intellectuals first of all, as a collective, generational endeavour. The so called "uppity generation", which was a co...
Article
The initial optimistic illusions about the future of postcommunist countries have been cut short by not so encouraging developments in these societies. With the growing awareness that the postcommunist transition cannot be understood as a linear passage to a free market and parliamentary democracy, more attention is paid to the social and economic...
Article
Change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union presents a whole new set of sociological problems, requiring a revision of old theories of large-scale institutional change. My aim in this paper is to delineate patterns and gaps to be found in sociological theories dealing with change in Soviet-type societies. After a short review of the explanatory c...
Article
The purpose of this article is to analyse the effect of the federal structure on public health policy in a crisis situation. Federalism has been one of the most important features of the Australian political system shaping AIDS policy because it has created problems with the coordination of policies and has limited the Commonwealth's capacity to in...
Article
“Man can realize his political freedom only through his own action, by determining the aim and method of political power…Thus the democratic political system is the only one which institutionalizes the activist element of political freedom” (Neumenn 1957: 186)
Article
“It has been said that trust is ‘a device for coping with the freedom of others’, but the prime condition of requirements for trust is not lack of power but lack of full information” (Giddens 1990: 33)
Article
“We study what is significant for us and we explain the problems we study in terms of their significance for us” (Abrams 1982: 78).
Article
Almost a decade after the wave of transformations from authoritarian to democratic regimes started in Latin America, Eastern European countries, one after another, entered the path leading towards democracy. The end of 1989 and the first part of 1990 saw unheard of numbers of free elections in ten Latin American and all East European countries (wit...
Article
Emergencies commonly reveal the disorder from which routine order is painfully extracted. They dramatise social fissures, inconsistencies and ignorance that ordinarily remain hidden or can be ignored without damage or controversy. They transform the taken-for-granted into the up-for-discussion, compel the formation of decisions and accompanying jus...
Article
Full-text available
Article
Eastern Europe's recent revolutions theoretically should provide a new opportunity for communities affected by HIV. By looking at the Polish case I will try to evaluate how these opportunities have been utilized. Although, compared with the numbers of the AIDS cases and the HIV-infected in the West, Polish numbers are small, a lack of proper medica...
Article
The author compares the status of non-English speaking (NES) migrant women with that of their native-born counterparts in Australia. She concludes that "Australian born women and migrant women have certain experiences in common; low economic position, being the target of discriminatory practices in education and in work, and their overall marginali...
Article
The processes which occurred in the Philippines in 1986 were perceived as similar to the ones which took place in Poland in 1980-1981. This perceived similarity is based on some aspects of the state structure and on the fact that in both cases society rebelled against the regime. By looking into the two cases we analyze the repressive regimes as be...
Article
The processes which occurred in the Philippines in 1986 were perceived as similar to the ones which took place in Poland in 1980-1981. This perceived similarity is based on some aspects of the state structure and on the fact that in both cases society rebelled against the regime. By looking into the two cases we analyze the repressive regimes as be...
Article
This article examines the image of barriers to development and change of socialist society, as seen by Polish sociologists. The question of planning and directing social development is of crucial meaning for socialist ideology. Therefore revealing how the ideal type of socialist society confronts both the reality of social pressures and of politica...
Article
This paper deals with the sociological theories that developed in Poland during the height of societal expectations for better life and a brighter future. However, the decade of 1970-80 already contained seeds of crisis. The mainstream sociological theories that are analysed here neglected many of the alarming features of the socialist society alre...
Article
This article examines developmental processes in postwar Poland. The primacy of politics over economy is an ideological principle of socialist systems. Developmental processes, therefore, are controlled by political and not economic logic. After the initial period of political pluralism in Poland (1944-1948), when the improvement of social consumpt...
Article
The language of contemporary sociological writings contains several terms, words and con- cepts which refer openly or implicitly to significant awareness of existing epistemic and heuristic shortcomings of sociological knowledge, and to the specificity of modernity which brought this knowledge about. The way sociological knowledge has been patterne...

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