Drawing on in-depth, narrative interviews with 24 self-identified Otherkin, Therianthropes, and Vampires, we explore how members of these communities navigate Bamberg’s three “dilemmatic spaces” or tensions of continuity/change, ...

William (Billy) Shaffir taught about what it means to be a true empiricist, a sociologist committed to naturalistic observation as the most incisive method in our scientific toolbox. His inspiration still resonates, two ...

A basic feature of professions is specialized competence. Indeed, expertise grants professions and their members privileged, prestigious, and protected statuses. Members of professions thus face interactional pressure to ...

To write a sociological festschrift for a scholar necessarily means looking at a chain of influence instead of one person. In this essay, I honor William Shaffir, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at McMaster University, who ...

Shaffir (1998:63) writes, “We must learn to reclaim the virtue of patience. When we enhance the pace of doing research, it is often at the expense of acquiring a deep appreciation of the research problem.” This paper engages ...

The article addresses an issue important in educational sciences which is emotional education understood as an activity for human emotional development. It is important in the context of lifelong learning, that is, both ...

Against the backdrop of contemporary sociological theories of love, this article explores the disappearance of the other in contemporary love relationships by focusing on the relationship between love and depression. The ...

Qualitative research aims at unwrapping the ordinary and the exceptional in order to bring us closer to a complete description and interpretation of life. People’s narratives are particularly effective in revealing deeper ...

The article focuses on the problem of life strategies adapted by the representatives of young Polish middle-class in the (post)transformation period in Poland towards different aspects of social change. On the basis of two ...