Common Places: Sharing Spaces in Early Modern ‘Ordinary’ Houses

The debate on common spaces inside buildings is linked to twentieth-century forms of popular housing, often devoid of places and opportunities to share a space which is conceived as fragmented and not collective. In recent years, an interest in the appropriation of urban space from the bottom up and the unanimous recognition of the need for places to meet within (or annexed to) buildings, have led to the definition of these ‘intermediate spaces’ as an essential part of living together. Compared to these common spaces, early modern houses pose an essential question: how was proximity within buildings structured, prior to the birth of intimacy? The well-known different perception of promiscuity, in fact, allowed a different structuring of collective housing and a physical proximity that coexisted with the strong social distance sanctioned by inequality by birth. To answer this question, the article examines the types of intermediate spaces, called loci comuni – stairs, landings, passages and courtyards – rather well-known in noble residences, much less in the houses of the popular classes. Through sources such as the fund of the Presidenza delle strade, inventories, land registers, notarial deeds of sale of houses and experts’ estimations, the article will investigate the uses of these spaces made by their inhabitants.

Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva: an intellectual of the most “refined demeanor” in Brazilian Social Sciences

In this article, we recall the legacy of Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva, a victim of COVID-19 in 2020, for Brazilian Social Sciences and, more specifically, Urban Sociology. This was the field to which Machado had dedicated himself during more than 50 years of research and studies, opening new paths and analytical perspectives for the study of life on the “margins” (favelas and peripheries of large cities - contemplated through the city of Rio de Janeiro, where he lived and conducted his research). Within different contexts, Machado analyzed the State production of “urban marginality”, seeking to understand the life experiences, survival strategies, political struggles and challenges of the urban popular strata. As of the 1990s, he also dedicated himself to analyzing the effects caused by the erosion of the world of work and by state regulation that erstwhile accompanied it, thereby guaranteeing a minimum of rights and some social integration. Thus, within this context, he directed his analytical efforts towards understand both the meaning and the uses of the category of informality, and above all, was attentive to and concerned with the effects brought by the emergence of violent crime from within an urban structure torn apart by the labor crisis, as the social foundation to the times of deconstruction of our institutional and political paradigm of social integration. Since it would be impossible to gauge the true grandeur of his work, we have sought to reconstruct just a part of his research trajectory and his analytical contribution to Urban Sociology within the different contexts. We also emphasize a lesser known aspect of Machado: that of a public intellectual who always sought to intervene in the public debate regarding the place of the urban popular classes within the city.

Understanding the World

This chapter examines the evidence in Colson’s correspondence that throws light on his “culture,” the manner in which he understood and interpreted his world. Although the emphasis is on the end of the Old Regime, the examination also helps illuminate his views during the Revolution. Among the topics dealt with are his writing facility and style, the books in his personal library, the newspapers he read, his reporting on local gossip, his attitude toward the king, his account of the War of American Independence, his relationship to the Enlightenment, his reports on the earliest hot-air balloons, his experience with sickness and medicine, his attitudes toward the popular classes, and his relations with women. In general, the chapter concludes that there is virtually no evidence of an influence of the canonical Enlightenment on Colson’s beliefs, nor is there evidence of a “desacralization of the monarchy” before 1789. Nevertheless, later Revolutionary attitudes are possibly prefigured in his clear sympathy for the lower classes and in his penchant for practical reforms in some aspects of daily life.

Days of Glory

The chapter follows Colson and his neighbors during the extraordinary spring and summer of 1789, with particular emphasis on their wavering views toward the king and the popular classes, and on the alternating emotions of joy and enthusiasm, on the one hand, and fear and suspicion, on the other. Particular attention is given to Colson’s descriptions of the Réveillon Riots of late April 1789; the deliberations in Versailles of the Estates General and, especially, of the Third Estate; the series of patriotic oaths in Versailles and in Paris; the fear of a mercenary army surrounding Paris and its supposed links to an “aristocratic plot”; the fall of the Bastille and the ensuing Great Fear in both Paris and the provinces; the decrees of the newly formed National Assembly in August 1789 abolishing feudalism and proclaiming a Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen; and the formation of a National Guard in Colson’s neighborhood and in Paris generally.

DONATUS' RESISTANCE TO ROMAN POWER, BETWEEN THE 3RD AND 5TH CENTURIES AD

According to the term Catholic polemicists, historians such as Opitat Milév and Saint Augustin, who called the anti-Romanian movement and the Catholic Church of Carthage loyal to it, called the Donatismus, a Christian religious movement that appeared in Morocco in the third century AD and flourished between the fourth and fifth centuries AD, which was named after one of its great founders (Donatus), a Christian cleric born in Tivest (present-day Algeria), who refused to submit to the will of the emperor, and the resistance of the Catholic bishops of Carthage who They contented themselves with being under the banner of the emperor and the Roman authority, Those conditions in which Donatus saw a severe indignation from the principles of Christ and a shattering of the strength of the faithful believers in Christianity, an outright retreat from true Christianity, a religious apostasy and a betrayal of the victims of oppression (martyrs). Donatism emerged in the form of an independent religious current opposing the Church of Carthage, a reason that was sufficient for the beginning of the conflict between Donatism and its allies from The lower popular classes, together with the Church of Carthage and the Romanian authority, were evident in the many revolutions throughout Morocco, represented by the revolutions of the Circum Cellas, who tasted the woes of the Romanian authority and the Catholic Christians in Morocco, and the revolts of the Fermus brothers and after Gildon (Ghildon), However, the Romanian authority did not remain static, but rather used all its capabilities to quell these revolutions and eliminate this Donatian bee that was able to strike the stability of the Romans and Catholics in Morocco.

Effects of socioeconomic status on the use of written language: does it extend into Brazilian Higher Education?

Bourdieu and Passeron defended the thesis that the school was the main locus to legitimate and perpetuate class differences. This is reinforced by the multiple proficiency tests used to monitor public policies, which privilege the use of the formal language as part of the instruments and, therefore, penalizes participants with less mastery of the language. We adjusted two hierarchical models with Enade’s results on standard Portuguese grades, using as covariates, indicators of students’ socioeconomic status and economic independence and average values for these variables for the knowledge areas. The linguistic performance is disaggregated into three aspects: textual, orthographic and vocabulary/morphosyntactic. More affluent socioeconomic groups have greater proficiency in the Enade Portuguese Language component, even when controlling for the knowledge area average socio-economic level and financial autonomy of the students. The socioeconomic effect is not as strong as on lower educational level: university students constitute a rather homogeneous group. This reinforces Bourdieu’s thesis that through the social, cultural and economic capital still prevails the domination of wealthier classes over more popular classes, reinforcing the inequality.

Forging Polity in Times of International Class War: The Parliamentary Rhetoric on Labour in the First Polish Diet, 1919–1922

This article examines the impact of internal and external pressures on the parliamentary debate concerning the place of the working class within a newly emerging polity. Based on machine-assisted distant reading and close hermeneutics of parliamentary session transcripts, I ask how the first diet of the modern Polish state (1919–1922) responded to labour militancy and war. My analysis demonstrates that social unrest was successfully used by the left to foster inclusion of the popular classes in a political, social, and economic sense, contributing to the democratization of the state. In contrast, the external threat of war had an opposite effect. Although it justified the left advocating greater inclusion of workers and peasants because of their high death toll on the battlefields, it was actually the right that capitalized on national unity and readily used arguments about the Bolshevik threat or traitors among the landless masses to block or even reverse reforms aimed at democratization. The external threat of war, waged against a nominally leftist political force, helped the weak state to reduce the high impact of labour unrest on parliamentary proceedings.

Implementing virtual mind-body programming to support cancer patients during COVID-19.

1585 Background: Despite growing evidence of mind-body therapies for physical and psychological health among patients with cancer, their access remains limited. The COVID-19 pandemic has further disrupted the delivery of necessary cancer and supportive care; thus, the need to support patients with cancer is unprecedented. To expand the reach and access of mind-body therapies, we developed, implemented, and evaluated a novel virtual mind-body program for patients with cancer. Methods: We rapidly developed a 7-day a week virtual mind-body program, Integrative Medicine at Home (IM@Home), for patients with cancer (ages ≥18 years) and deployed it on April 1st, 2020. IM@Home included mind-body group therapy classes in fitness, meditation, yoga, dance, tai chi, and music delivered using Zoom video conferencing. Classes ranged from 30-45 minutes and were led by an integrative medicine clinician. Patients had the option to register for a 1-month, 3-month, or 6-month membership to gain unlimited access to all virtual mind-body classes. Multi-method evaluation was conducted using the RE-AIM conceptual framework to guide surveys and qualitative interviews. Surveys were analyzed using descriptive statistics and interviews were analyzed using grounded theory. Results: Between April 2020 and January 2021, IM@Home registered over 32,000 class participants, with a weekly average attendance of 700-800 participants. In a 4-month post-deployment survey (n = 131), nearly all participants were satisfied with IM@Home (93.9%) and would recommend the program to friends and family (95.4%). A majority of participants also found IM@Home to be simple to use (87.0%) and said the program had a variety of classes that interested them (93.1%). Three-quarters of participants (74.8%) were taking 3 to 7 classes a week (range: 1 to 15 classes), among which the most popular classes were fitness (88.7%), chair yoga (37.1%), and tai chi (33.1%). Most participants preferred a 3-month membership (51.6%), followed by a 6-month membership (19.5%). In qualitative interviews (n = 30), participants reported IM@Home helped them to: 1) maintain structured routines and stay motivated to exercise; 2) cope with COVID-19-related and cancer-related stressors; and 3) connect with their fellow cancer patient community and foster social relationships during a time of isolation. Conclusions: Virtual mind-body programming, through IM@Home, reached many patients with cancer to address their physical and psychological challenges during COVID-19. As patients with cancer experience high physical and psychological symptom burden following diagnosis, future clinical trials are needed to evaluate the specific effects of IM@Home when integrated into active treatment and survivorship care.

Designs involving sequences of treatments with residuals proportional to direct effects

Designs involving sequences of treatments are advantageously used when observations are taken repeatedly from same experimental unit period after period as a new treatment is applied in each period. Hence, inclusion of residual effects into the model becomes the most important feature of such designs. Six popular classes of designs involving sequences of treatments are studied under a model with carryover effects proportional to the direct effects where the unknown proportionality parameter assumed values from -1 to +1. The objective of this empirical study was to determine the value of proportionality parameter for which maximum information can be drawn from the design.

Counter-talk as symbolic boundary drawing: Challenging legitimate cultural practices in individual and focus group interviews in the lower regions of social space

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out.