http://hdl.handle.net/11089/54572 2026-04-15T06:22:31Z 2026-04-15T06:22:31Z Bielińska, Magdalena http://hdl.handle.net/11089/54576 2025-02-11T02:31:42Z 2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

Passions, Travel, and Cultural Participation—Intergenerational Transmission of Middle-Class Lifestyles Bielińska, Magdalena The article addresses the intergenerational transmission of a middle-class lifestyle in Poland. The analysis demonstrates mechanisms through which cultural practices are inherited in the context of leisure activities. The following categories of leisure activities were identified as being of particular interest: 1) passions, that is, the most pronounced leisure interests, including sport, 2) travel, 3) various forms of cultural participation, such as reading, visual and performing arts, or audiovisual content. The innovative research plan included reanalysis, revisits, and new in-depth interviews. The findings are based on a substantial corpus of qualitative empirical material, comprising 66 individual in-depth interviews. This material covers interviews conducted approximately twenty years before my research, new interviews with the same participants conducted subsequently, and interviews with their adult children. The aforementioned methodological procedures permitted comparisons over time and between generations. Middle-class parents proactively transmit values and practices to their children that are instrumental in maintaining their children’s social status. The effort to format lifestyle messages has significant implications for the long-term viability of this social structure segment in Poland. The analyses conducted indicate the cultural identity of the middle class and the stability of values and practices enacted in non-work and non-educational leisure time. Consequently, they are expected to yield tangible benefits in the professional and educational domains for subsequent generations. This represents the anticipated return on investment in leisure time for middle-class children.

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z Grol-Prokopczyk, Hanna http://hdl.handle.net/11089/54575 2025-02-11T02:31:46Z 2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

Why Are There So Many Ways to Measure Pain? Epistemological and Professional Challenges in Medical Standardization Grol-Prokopczyk, Hanna Pain is a profoundly subjective phenomenon, which remains largely impenetrable to the tools of biomedicine. How, then, do pain researchers—specifically, quantitative medical researchers whose work is predicated on transforming pain into numbers—measure pain in their studies? How do they select and justify specific measures, and does this process lead to measurement standardization? This article analyzes 79 published medical studies about low back pain (LBP) and 20 interviews with pain experts (including 15 with authors of the reviewed studies) to address these questions. Findings reveal that LBP researchers use an extremely diverse set of outcome measures in their studies, typically based on patient self-report. The subjectivity and interpersonal incomparability of self-reports are widely acknowledged but treated as largely unproblematic—a matter of acceptable measurement error rather than “epistemological purgatory” (Barker 2005). However, researchers frequently disagree on what constitutes a “pain measure.” Many respond to the considerable challenge of treating pain intensity by redefining their work—sometimes in the face of resistance from patients—around other, putatively more treatable domains, such as disability. The diverse, arguably unstandardized approaches to measuring pain appear attributable less to pain’s epistemological fragility than to its therapeutic intractability, and to the medical community’s diffuse social structures and professional goals.

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z Morshedi, Pouya van den Scott, Lisa-Jo K. http://hdl.handle.net/11089/54574 2025-02-11T02:31:45Z 2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

Sing A Song for Home: How Displaced Iranian Song-Writers in LA Conceive of Home and Homeland Morshedi, Pouya; van den Scott, Lisa-Jo K. We ask how being apart from home impacts the very definition of home. We conducted a content analysis of songs produced by Iranians who have left their first “home” in Iran and resettled in Los Angeles. Our findings suggest that distance from one’s home expands the definition and image of home from a structure where one dwells and calls home, to an imagined community at the personal (home family), local (hometown), and regional (homeland) levels. The 1979 revolution in Iran caused many people, including singers and songwriters, to immigrate. Many of them moved to Europe and North America. We analyzed songs from 1979 to 1999, produced in Los Angeles, as the heart of Iranian pop music after the revolution, focusing on the concept of “home.” Four main themes emerged: the “body of the home,” which includes windows, niches, and gardens; “homeland as home;” “home and family;” “home as a heaven to remember and a haven for return,” which involves home as a place for making memories and recalling them and home as a retreat. We explain how these themes are related to Iran’s situation post-revolution, the image of the Iranian home, and the singers’ situation in Los Angeles after the revolution. The most significant finding is the relationship between home and homeland. Songs use home as a metaphor for the homeland, even when describing the body of the home. The sadness about the destroyed home, hope to return to home, and the tendency to come back to their mother (or motherland) point to the singers’ emotions about their homeland. The distance from home has changed the conceptualization of “home.” The borders of home are not around the songwriters’ houses or intimate families anymore, but they are around the homeland.

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z Delli Paoli, Angela Maddaloni, Domenico http://hdl.handle.net/11089/54573 2025-02-11T02:31:43Z 2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

Aspirations and Networks of Italian Migrants to Bogota. A Typology Delli Paoli, Angela; Maddaloni, Domenico This paper aims to understand the individual and relational motives supporting migration from Italy to Bogota. Our concern is to achieve a nuanced understanding of how aspirations, on the one hand, and social networks, on the other, shape migratory decisions and structure in broader migration patterns. To do this, we chose a qualitative approach based on narrative interviews with Italians living in Bogota, which were selected through snowball sampling. As a result, we produced a typology of five different migration pathways: globetrotters aspiring to international mobility with no mediators supporting their process of continuous migration; careerists who accept moving on demand of their company for advancing their career supported by professional mediators; risk-takers aspiring to professional independence and supported in their entrepreneurial project by weak ties; tied migrants aspiring to better family quality of life and supported by strong familial ties; and exiled migrants who find a refuge from the difficulties they encounter in Italy and supported by strong professional ties.

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