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The Hispanic and Anglo worlds are often portrayed as the Cain and Abel of Western culture, antagonistic and alien to each other. This book challenges such view with a new critical conceptual framework – the 'Hispanic-Anglosphere' – to open a window into the often surprising interactions of individuals, transnational networks and global communities that, it argues, made of the British Isles (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) a crucial hub for the global Hispanic world, a launching-pad and a bridge between Spanish Europe, Africa, America and Asia in the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Perhaps not unlike today, that was a time marked by social uncertainty, pandemics, the dislocation of global polities and the rise of radicalisms. The volume offers insights on many themes including trade, the arts, education, language, politics, the press, religion, biodiversity, philanthropy, anti-slavery and imperialism. Established academics and rising stars from different continents and disciplines combined original, primary research with a wide range of secondary sources to produce a rich collection of ten case-studies, 25 biographies and seven samples of interpreted material culture, all presented in an accessible style appealing to scholars, students and the general reader alike.

(Auto)biographies are not accidental products; instead, they are shaped by the social world which gives birth to them. Societies inherently impact an individual's life by means of their very social structures, which are themselves created through the interaction of social actors within and across a society's history. In other words, the constant symbiotic interaction between social structures and social actors is an ongoing dynamic that can be observed and explained within historical and contemporary events. Consequently, the different social worlds in which an individual grows up and lives impact that individual's life course. This conceptual paper draws on my experiences of teaching and researching in different societies. It examines an example of autobiography becoming intertwined with social structure in a way that shapes one's academic life and discipline through socially constructed networks. It argues that social worlds shape the social actor regardless of society, lending credence to the necessity for biographical and oral history, or "narrative" approaches to sociological discourse across societies. In this paper I rely on different facets of my life to reflect on many years of engagement in teaching and researching sociological material and of the inner longing to unravel the eternal interconnectedness between the personal and the social.

Abstract
In this article, I will focus on the study of the living space in houses of Russian-speaking emigrants in 1990s–2000s in Germany. I will discuss the "home" in several aspects: in a wide sense as a place on Earth where people's life goes on, as physically built environment where a family dwells, and as objectified everyday life in the interiors. The choice of objects and furnishings for a "Russian" house in Germany cannot be classified, but it is unique and is associated with the biographies of the owners, the history of each individual family, as well as the history of moving to Germany. The "Russian" house in Germany turns out to be a complex phenomenon: it can be seen as a safe space, escape from the outside world, and offering emotional comfort. It is a place for representation of family and personal values, the owners' identity, and preferences. It is also a scene where scenarios of relationships between a person and objects unfold. The objects that a person places in his/her house appear as objectified memories of life events and other people, reflecting the importance of family and interpersonal relationships expressed in gifts, photos, children's drawings, and crafts. In a new place, people are no longer limited to a set of typical furnishing patterns that were dictated by a shortage of goods and ideas in the country of origin. House owners show their personality, trying to make their home different from that in the place of origin and introduce a non-standard style of European interiors in their homes, yet unwittingly they often reproduce stereotypes and fragments from their previous houses where they lived before migrating.

Ferdinand III. inherited the Thirty Years' war from its father, Ferdinand II. In the centre of his reign, the war ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia and thereby the long time of the confessional arguments going along with denomination questions. The Peace of Westphalia was at the same time an important stage in the decay of the alliance of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburger which had emerged under Karl of the V. and which had polarised Europe about for one century. Now the Peace helped to create sovereign member states in Europe. For Ferdinand III. this multilayered epoch change presented itself as a number of dilemmas. These resulted from his search for peace and at the same time his attempts to fight for more favourable peace conditions; his separation from Spain against his consent and nevertheless his attempts to hold on to his Iberian relatives which were nevertheless slipping away; his timid protection of peace after 1648 and nevertheless his return against his consent to the European wars of the 1650er-Jahre. For a new comprehension of the time of Ferdinand III, it seemed important it to me to particularly stress some structural aspects, above all the close entwinement of the controversy over denominations and rule rights. In his elective monarchies, in the Empire, and in Hungary, Ferdinand III. pursued a pragmatically moderated confessional policy, in his hereditary countries, Austria and Bohemia, he was a rigid counter reformer. His counter reformation however was not only motivated religiously, but it was directed at the same time against the almost autonomous rule of the aristocracy over the rural subjects. Both confessional pragmatism and the counter reformation based on the regionally established church were a burden on the relationship Ferdinand III. to the papacy, who anyhow resisted to the dominance of the house of Habsbourg in Italy. The manuscript also provides new aspects regarding the cultural dimension of early-modern rule. The text essential stresses the pictures and terms, the symbols and rituals on which the Emperor's self understanding and his relation to the world was based and lived accordingly. Education, environment and ceremoniality take therefore much space. Rulers of the early modern times knew themselves observed and acted thereafter. If it is so difficult to determine precisely the share of Ferdinands III. of 'his' government, this is not only due to institutionalised discussions and the separation of functions within a complex government machinery. It is furthermore not only due to the fact that the Court was for the Emperor and courtiers a convincingly handled instrument of the self-manifestation with representative stage appearances on the one hand and useful concealments on the other hand. It is due above all to the fact that this Emperor did not understand governance in a modern, comprehensive sense as politics. Governance did not serve the realisation of an utopia formulated from an individual point of view or from the society. The cosmos for Ferdinand III.was still God-given, an allegedly natural order. The task of princes therein was limited, and the protection and the development of princes' rule considering the complexity of confessional and political goals and problems were in practice difficult enough. That this Emperor took up the idea of state sovereignty was a step of detachment from what he once learned to be correct. In alchemy, in magnetism and in music, Ferdinand III. continued to look for an expression of the natural order of the things. On the other hand (also here the Emperor stands at an epoch change) he was interested in a phenomenon, whose physical and artistic developments in the 17. Century destroyed the bases of his mental world: in seeing. The Emperor learned that not only the regarded object, but also the person seeing takes part in the construction of one's picture.

The article aims to contribute to the growing literature on exploring relationships between objects, homes and identities in the context of migration. Using examples from a qualitative study of homemaking practices of Russian-speaking communities in the UK, the article discusses how the presence and use of certain objects and foods reflect complex meanings about home and belonging. Specifically, the article deploys the idea of 'diasporic' objects that signify the ambivalent nature of migrants' relationships with their past and present homes simultaneously acting as symbols of connection and detachment. As the objects 'travel' through different homes so too do their meanings, and, through this, 'diasporic' objects accumulate new values and biographies embedded in wider cultural and transnational contexts. Analytically, the concept of diasporic objects is offered as a way to approach the feeling of home as a changing category that is (re)produced through memories and senses, as well as through particular ways of appropriation and personalisation of spaces and places.

Abstract
Feminist historiography is rife with debates about the nature and boundaries of women's movements. Arguments over who to call an activist or a feminist sit at the heart of these definitional debates, which provide the groundwork for how scholars understand contemporary feminisms. Given the heated nature of ongoing disputes over the complicated identity politics of feminism and its archives, it is surprising that scholars have afforded so little attention to the technical infrastructure that defines and provides access to digitized primary source material, which is increasingly the foundation for contemporary historical research. Metadata plays an outsized role in these definitions, especially for photographic material that cannot be made word-searchable but is favored by digitizers because of its popularity. This article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how two digital archives define the Swedish suffrage movement - a historically contested concept, here understood through the theory of Susan Leigh Star as a "boundary object" subject to "interpretive flexibility". The study uses keywords attached to photographic material from the the National Resource Library for Gender Studies (KvinnSam) and metadata within the related Swedish Women's Biographical Lexicon platform for women's biographies. The findings indicate that the hierarchies of archival organization do not disappear with individual document digitization and description. Instead, the silences built into physical archives are redefined in digital collections, obscuring the tensions between individual and movement feminisms, as well as the contested nature of movement boundaries.

Abstract


This research contributes to our understanding of disposal by attempting to foreground the journey of the disposed object rather than examining disposal from the perspective of the seller as previous consumer researchers have done. Drawing on ideas taken from anthropological analyses of objects and markets the paper provides a glimpse of the cultural biographies of a number of collectable objects as they are disposed of through the public arena of auction. Analysing the disposal of meaningful possessions through auction provides a different context and associated dynamics to that studied in previous research on disposal. Ethnographic analysis indicates that in spite of the fact that the practices and rituals of auction facilitate a process of commoditisation which erases the cultural biography of objects, still traces of their previous cultural history transfer with these objects to their new owners. The objects themselves are implicated in this transfer of meaning indicating that objects do have some kind of social agency.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article explores the concept of sonic memory via the investigation of popular music that constitutes a radio playlist. Our case study focuses on the songs aired on Israel's Memorial Day for the Holocaust and the Heroism during the state's first decade of local-commercial radio broadcasting (1993–2002). The critical analysis sought to understand what makes certain songs so identifiable with the national mourning ritual and the ways in which such songs gain the authority to symbolize and shape social memories. The article deconstructs the songs' commemorative authority through three primary questions: (1) What is one permitted to sing about when addressing the Holocaust in popular music? (2) Who is permitted to sing or write about it? (3) How are those individual artists permitted to sing about the Holocaust within the context of popular music? The findings suggest that the authority of the songs as 'cultural objects' is derived from a complex combination of their quiet tone and slow tempo, the biographies of their creators and performers, and their lyrics, written by poets who embrace a philosophical-existential point of view. Beyond this analysis, the article seeks to understand the power and efficacy of popular music as a cultural object.

▪ Abstract  Routines, protocols, and organization charts focus attention, structure cognition, and shape decision making. Participants in organizations, legal systems, and markets compare cases, deciding which protocol governs the treatment of each case in a stream. But situations vary in the extent to which thought and action are effectively governed by routines and standard operating procedures. In less structured or more chaotic situations, biography is an alternative form of analysis that shapes cognition and helps people make sense of otherwise uninterpretable events. Biography and narrative do their work by constructing the causal unity of objects over time rather than by constructing causation from a comparison across similar cases. Using examples such as critically ill infants, animals, heirlooms, the penalty phase of capital trials, juvenile justice, the lower criminal courts, religious relics, and cloth, the paper compares case and biographical analysis in organizations, legal settings, and markets, asking how these different ways of thinking come about and what follows from them.

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have 'experience'. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an 'insider-outside', that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as 'women') could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat.

In social science research, alcohol is conventionally approached as a public health problem. Women's drinking in particular has been associated with stigma and "mothers ruin." Despite the focus on addiction and drunkenness in much of the existing social science research and in the popular press, most peoples relationships to alcohol are not characterized by addiction or regular drunkenness. Rather, alcohol is a pervasive component of peoples day-to-day lives: it is a potential source of both pleasure and harm that for many people is embedded in the structure of weekly life. My PhD research explores the uses and meanings of alcohol in the day-to-day lives of three generations of women residing in the North West of England. It aims to understand how relationships to alcohol change as women grow older and "travel through" the life course, as well as generational changes in how women have experienced and made sense of drinking alcohol. I conducted 38 life history interviews focusing on participants "drinking biographies," that is, their narratives about what role, if any, alcohol played in their lives, beginning with childhood and ending with the present. In some of these interviews, photo and object elicitation techniques were employed, whereas in other interviews these techniques were not used. This case study explores the benefits as well as some of the practical limitations and challenges of using photo and object elicitation techniques in life history interviews and stresses the importance of being prepared to improvise when using these techniques.

"Private," personal spaces such as the teenage bedroom are arguably one of the first spaces within which young people are able to articulate and represent their social and cultural lives, their transitions, experiences, aspirations, and identities. In this article, the author explores how bedrooms can be understood as constantly evolving and changing "material" spaces within which objects play an important role for young people in their articulations of youth culture in everyday life. Using Henri Lefebvre's work on social space as a framework, the author argues that such spaces can be understood both as complex, rich "containers of meaning" within which teenagers articulate their current youth biographies as well as spaces within which "residual trails" can be found, thus a teenage bedroom takes on an important historical dimension, the space of which tells tales about its occupants, present and past.

AbstractResearch on institutional care and its long‐term effect on life trajectories provides crucial and sometimes unexpected insights. In a qualitative study in Switzerland, we have conducted 37 narrative interviews with people who experienced residential care between 1950 and 1990. The analysis was based on a reconstructive life course perspective and grounded theory. The findings show a complex interplay of residential care context (here: narratives from expert discourses) and intersubjective experiences during and after care. Most interviewees learned from their experiences to be sceptical of social relationships and of all kinds of state interventions—even decades after having left. A few were able to take charge of their lives and steer them in an individually successful direction. In these cases too, results point to fragile concepts of success. Thus, critical questions about residential care in these decades remain. We suggest that rather than abolish residential care facilities, we need to gather more evidence about the factors that contribute to high‐quality out‐of‐home‐placements. As professional settings, they can enable young people individually. They need to avoid responding to children as 'objects of care', by neglecting all subjective dimensions and reproducing a pattern of powerlessness with a strong focus on formal, measurable goals.

The purpose of the study is to analyze the educational and educational potential of the biographies of doctors-writers of the USA of the 20th century in the formation of hard and soft skills of students of higher medical education. Research methods: analysis, synthesis, systematization, generalization; search and bibliographic; analysis of literary sources; historical and comparative; biographical. The object of the study is the biographies of William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), Frank G. Slaughter (1908–2001), Richard Hooker (1924–1997), Allen Richard Seltzer (1928–2016) and Michael Crichton (1942–2008). Scientific novelty. The article substantiates the expediency of studying the biographies and elements of the literary heritage of doctors-writers of the USA of the 20th century for the purpose of comprehensive and harmonious development of students in medical universities. Conclusions. It is shown that getting acquainted with the biographies of outstanding doctors-writers of English-speaking countries during extracurricular educational activities contributes to the development of soft skills, as well as to the improvement of the communicative competence of students of higher medical education