Cosima Rughinis | University of Bucharest (original) (raw)

Papers by Cosima Rughinis

Gender, Place & Culture, 2024

This paper uses the method of concerned photography to examine the reproduction and disruption of... more This paper uses the method of concerned photography to examine the reproduction and disruption of gender status through urbanscapes comprising statues, outdoor advertisements, mural artworks, and other materialized gender displays in public spaces. We propose the sensitizing concept of 'massive gender displays' to analyse our corpus of photographs from cities in European countries and in the USA. Massive gender displays are subtypes of 'gender displays' understood, in a Goffmanian sense, as communicative acts that perform and reconstruct the social structure of gender. Relative to overall representations of gender in public settings, massive gender displays are remarkable either through size, as very large objects ('colossal displays'), or through repetition, as collections of representations that are scattered in space ('distributed displays') or concentrated and visible at-aglance ('choral displays'). As a rule, massiveness has an empowering effect in the public display of masculine characters; yet it is often a disempowering feature in the portrayal of women, accentuating absence, marginality, devaluation, exceptionality, and vulnerability. Still, massive displays may disrupt gender status hierarchies, in exceptional cases. Therefore, we invite all people who experience city life, be it as citizens, residents, researchers, students, designers, policy makers, activists, workers, tourists, or otherwise, to pay attention to displays' massiveness as a feature that ambivalently reproduces and disrupts gender status and inequalities of power, and thus partakes in the construction of gender as a social institution.

Vaccine, 2022

The anti-vaccination movement, vaccine hesitancy, and wavering vaccination confidence have increa... more The anti-vaccination movement, vaccine hesitancy, and wavering vaccination confidence have increasingly become matters of public interest, in parallel with an increasing normalization of representations of vaccination as risky. In this study, we used data on vaccination beliefs and behaviors from two Eurobarometer surveys to classify attitudes towards vaccination and to discuss comparability, acquiescence, and other measurement issues. Through cluster analysis, we found that individuals in the European Union (EU27) can be classified into five opinion types, differentiating the poles (''vaccine-tru sting" and ''vaccine-distrusting") from the ''hesitant & free choice" cluster and from two relatively uncommitted clusters, the ''agreeable" (or acquiescent) and the ''fence-sitters." Opinion configurations on vaccination were linked to the broader social structures of age, gender, and educational attainment, to experiences of adult vaccination, and trust in different information sources. We found that trust, distrust, and confusion about vaccination have permeated all social strata in EU countries. The pandemic years have amplified uncertainty concerning vaccine safety and its effectiveness. We also noticed a decrease of trust in the voices of mainstream medical experts during the pandemic period, from about 92 % in 2019 to 73 % in 2021, and a significant increase in people who declared that they ''don't know" whom to trust about vaccine information, ranging from 1 % to about 13 %. Measurements of vaccination confidence in Europe should control for acquiescence, through positively and negatively formulated items, and ensure comparability in time. We strongly recommend the inclusion of a battery of critical items in all future European Commission-funded surveys on vaccination to allow the monitoring of European public confidence in vaccination and in the relevant information sources, including trust in pharmaceutical companies; this will provide an avenue for re-establishing a broader confidence among citizens, health authorities, and specialists.

Contexts, 2021

In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal abo... more In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal about self and time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis shows that the self and time are related aspects of social interaction. The self is akin to a theatrical performance and our perception of time is altered by problematic circumstances.

Public Health, 2022

Objectives: We estimate patterns of covariation between COVID-19 and measles vaccination rates an... more Objectives: We estimate patterns of covariation between COVID-19 and measles vaccination rates and a set of widely used indicators of human, social, and economic capital across 146 countries. Study design: We conduct exploratory analyses of social patterns that uphold vaccination success for COVID-19 and measles. Methods: We use publicly available data on COVID vaccination rates and other country-level indicators from Our World in Data, Human Development Report, Corruption Perception Index, and the World Bank to devise bivariate correlations and multiple regression models. Results: About 70% of the variability in COVID-19 vaccination rates in February 2022 can be explained by differences in the Human Development Index (HDI) and, specifically, in life expectancy at birth. Trust in doctors and nurses adds predictive value beyond HDI, clarifying controversial discrepancies between vaccination rates in countries with similar levels of HDI and vaccine availability. Cardiovascular disease deaths, an indicator of general health system effectiveness, and infant measles immunization coverage, an indicator of country-level immunization effectiveness, are also significant, though weaker, predictors of COVID-19 vaccination success. Measles vaccination in 2019 is similarly predicted by HDI and trust in doctors and nurses. Conclusions: The remaining variability in COVID-19 vaccination success that cannot be pinned down through these sets of metrics points to a considerable scope for collective and individual agency in a time of crisis. The mobilization and coordination in the vaccination campaigns of citizens, medical professionals, scientists, journalists, and politicians, among others, account for at least some of this variability in overcoming vaccine hesitancy and inequity.

Feminist Media Studies, 2021

This paper documents the change and reproduction of gender status in the motion picture industry ... more This paper documents the change and reproduction of gender status in the motion picture industry by discussing patterns in protagonist choice and authorship of biographical films produced from 1900 to 2017. The results rely on a quantitative analysis of all 4,539 films on the IMDb platform labeled with the "Biography" tag that portray an individual main character in the selected years. We find that men-only filmmaking teams have been remarkably consistent from 1900 onward in their choice of male subjects, while mixed and women-only teams have driven an increase in the central representation of women as figures whose life is worthy of narration and remembrance. Therefore, the recently increased involvement of women as directors has significantly advanced the symbolic recognition of women in public cinematographic discourse. Our findings document the emergence of a transitional period in the biographical movie industry in which the reproduction of gender status asymmetries coexists with an increased participation of women in filmmaking.

Frontiers in Sociology, 2022

This article proposes a conceptual framework to study the social bifurcation of reality in polari... more This article proposes a conceptual framework to study the social bifurcation of reality in polarized science-trusting and science-distrusting lay worldviews, by analyzing and integrating five concepts: science work, number work, emotion work, time work, and boundary work. Despite the epistemological asymmetry between accounts relying on mainstream science and science-distrusting or denialist ones, there are symmetrical social processes contributing to the construction of lay discourses. Through conceptual analysis, we synthesize an alternative to the deficit model of contrarian discourses, replacing the model of social actors as “defective scientists” with a focus on their culturally competent agency. The proposed framework is useful for observing the parallel construction of polarized realities in interaction and their ongoing articulation through hinge objects, such as vaccines, seatbelts, guns, or sanitary masks in the Covid-19 context. We illustrate the framework through a compa...

Contexts, 2021

In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal abo... more In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal about self and time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis shows that the self and time are related aspects of social interaction. The self is akin to a theatrical performance and our perception of time is altered by problematic circumstances.

Time & Society, 2020

In Romania, as elsewhere, there is persistent controversy surrounding homeopathy wherein various ... more In Romania, as elsewhere, there is persistent controversy surrounding homeopathy wherein various parties try to draw the boundaries of legitimate medical practice. The literature on complementary and alternative medicine features little discussion on the temporal dimensions of controversies surrounding these therapies, focusing mainly on the temporalities of the lived experience of treatment. Yet time is a powerful resource for challenging and gaining legitimacy. In order to capture the use of time as a resource for legitimating or contesting homeopathy, we advance the theory of time work by examining the rhetorical role of different temporalities in this dispute. We find that proponents and users of homeopathy appeal to temporal properties of treatment, such as the longer duration of consultation, and of healing, namely, a specific sequence of symptoms and reactions, stories of failed biomedical treatments followed by successful homeopathic interventions, and stories of durable eff...

We propose a set of six topics of inquiry into historical games as regards their feminine charact... more We propose a set of six topics of inquiry into historical games as regards their feminine characters, and we illustrate them through an analysis of This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days. Historical games may include documented historical characters and fictive characters as well; the latter may aim to represent a type of real persons, or may be individualized as a purely fictional character. We argue that This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days have both strong and weak points in their construction of feminine characters, when taking into account the proposed set of indicators.

2021 23rd International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic led to fast and unexpected changes in social life, including education. Ins... more The COVID-19 pandemic led to fast and unexpected changes in social life, including education. Institutions and social actors were forced to rethink school participation in order to respect social distance, but also to ensure quality in education and social order. Digital and collaborative platforms replaced the physical classrooms and mediated the virtual interaction between students and teacher. The paper contributes to the scientific debate on collaborative learning, by analyzing the challenges and opportunities encountered by Romanian students, teachers, and parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on a national survey that elicits perspectives on quality and strategies of online education from 9401 students, 3265 teachers and 4269 parents. Online education has proven both an opportunity for systemic reform and a risk for social exclusion, rising concerns on how to leverage technology for extending, rather than diminishing, learning experiences.

2017 21st International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 2017

Organizations make extensive use of Big Data to classify and profile users, in order to effective... more Organizations make extensive use of Big Data to classify and profile users, in order to effectively personalize their online messages. Big Data is also increasingly relied on as a photograph of society, creating expectations of an increasingly more accurate predictive science. Yet, there are systemic challenges in using Big Data as a comprehensive source of information, and there is also public resistance. We analyze Eurobarometer survey data from April 2016 to identify actual socio-demographical limitations of online traces, charting public awareness and attitudes towards the use of online information for content personalization across the European Union.

Sociologie Romaneasca, 2020

Adapting “face-to-face” education to distance/remote and/or online education in response to the C... more Adapting “face-to-face” education to distance/remote and/or online education in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a massive challenge for countries around the world. Online education reignited older debates about inclusive education, such as hoped-for universal access versus current digital divides, prompting the public to reflect about the past, the present, and future of the educational system. This article analyzes the Romanian public discourse, both scientific and non-scientific, on emerging distance and online education in Romania during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to understand how public communication functioned as feedback for school digitalization. The paper charts the advantages and challenges of distance and online education experienced by various actors (teachers, students, and the members of civil society) or identified through scientific research, focusing on the way online education has spotlighted and reshaped social inequalities. We use thematic content...

Información del artículo Rumania: Organizarse para mejorar el entorno en un barrio marginal de Bu... more Información del artículo Rumania: Organizarse para mejorar el entorno en un barrio marginal de Bucarest.

Cyber-security concerns, experiences and protective activities are increasingly discussed not onl... more Cyber-security concerns, experiences and protective activities are increasingly discussed not only among specialists but among the general public. There is considerable variability among users, at individual and social level, in the intensity of digital activity, experience of cyber-attacks, preventive measures and concern with security. In this paper we rely on the Eurobarometer 87.4/2017 survey and we classify European Internet users in four attitudinal profiles: the avoiding, the exploratory, the wary and the aware. This empirical classification captures statistical variability and helps build a more nuanced profile of European countries, in order to adapt national policies of awareness to cybercrime.

Representations of femininity in video games and other media are often discussed with reference t... more Representations of femininity in video games and other media are often discussed with reference to the most popular games, their protagonists and their sexist predicament. This framing leaves in shadow other dimensions. We aim to identify some of them and to open a broader horizon for examining and designing femininity and gender in games. To this end we look into games with creative portrayals of feminine characters, diverging from the action-woman trope: The Walking Dead, The Path, and 80 Days. We talk in dialogue with scholars, but also with a digital crowd-critique movement for films and games, loosely centered on instruments such as the Bechdel-Wallace test and the TV Tropes.org wiki. We argue that the central analytical dimension of female character strength should be accompanied by three new axes, in order to examine feminine presence across ages, in the background fictive world created by the game, and in network edges of interaction.

Computer Law & Security Review, 2021

We study variability in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) awareness in relation to digita... more We study variability in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) awareness in relation to digital experience in the 28 European countries of EU27-UK, through secondary analysis of the Eurobarometer 91.2 survey conducted in March 2019 (N = 27,524). Education, occupation, and age are the strongest sociodemographic predictors of GDPR awareness, with little influence of gender, subjective economic well-being, or locality size. Digital experience is significantly and positively correlated with GDPR awareness in a linear model, but this relationship proves to be more complex when we examine it through a typological analysis. Using an exploratory k-means cluster analysis we identify four clusters of digital citizenship, across both dimensions of digital experience and GDPR awareness: the off-line citizens (22%), the social netizens (32%), the web citizens (17%), and the data citizens (29%). The off-line citizens rank lowest in internet use and GDPR awareness; the web citizens rank at abou...

American journal of therapeutics, Jan 27, 2017

We discuss homeopathy's placebo effect as the result of a distributed therapeutic agency invo... more We discuss homeopathy's placebo effect as the result of a distributed therapeutic agency involving humans, objects, and texts. Homeopathy has been involved in controversies for centuries, and the dispute whether it is therapy or quackery is as lively as ever. Still, homeopathy has retained significant popularity and acceptance within the medical establishment. We bracket the issue of biochemical effectiveness of homeopathic remedies as we only discuss homeopathy's potential to elicit a placebo response within its therapeutic alliance, in virtue of its social, symbolic, and material features. The review is based on literature discussing homeopathic effectiveness, including historical, biographical, sociological, and epistemological perspectives. We build upon research that clarifies the therapeutic relationship, examining its activities and meanings for practitioners and patients. Previous analyses discussing homeopathy's placebo effect stress the importance of the indivi...

Gender, Place & Culture, 2024

This paper uses the method of concerned photography to examine the reproduction and disruption of... more This paper uses the method of concerned photography to examine the reproduction and disruption of gender status through urbanscapes comprising statues, outdoor advertisements, mural artworks, and other materialized gender displays in public spaces. We propose the sensitizing concept of 'massive gender displays' to analyse our corpus of photographs from cities in European countries and in the USA. Massive gender displays are subtypes of 'gender displays' understood, in a Goffmanian sense, as communicative acts that perform and reconstruct the social structure of gender. Relative to overall representations of gender in public settings, massive gender displays are remarkable either through size, as very large objects ('colossal displays'), or through repetition, as collections of representations that are scattered in space ('distributed displays') or concentrated and visible at-aglance ('choral displays'). As a rule, massiveness has an empowering effect in the public display of masculine characters; yet it is often a disempowering feature in the portrayal of women, accentuating absence, marginality, devaluation, exceptionality, and vulnerability. Still, massive displays may disrupt gender status hierarchies, in exceptional cases. Therefore, we invite all people who experience city life, be it as citizens, residents, researchers, students, designers, policy makers, activists, workers, tourists, or otherwise, to pay attention to displays' massiveness as a feature that ambivalently reproduces and disrupts gender status and inequalities of power, and thus partakes in the construction of gender as a social institution.

Vaccine, 2022

The anti-vaccination movement, vaccine hesitancy, and wavering vaccination confidence have increa... more The anti-vaccination movement, vaccine hesitancy, and wavering vaccination confidence have increasingly become matters of public interest, in parallel with an increasing normalization of representations of vaccination as risky. In this study, we used data on vaccination beliefs and behaviors from two Eurobarometer surveys to classify attitudes towards vaccination and to discuss comparability, acquiescence, and other measurement issues. Through cluster analysis, we found that individuals in the European Union (EU27) can be classified into five opinion types, differentiating the poles (''vaccine-tru sting" and ''vaccine-distrusting") from the ''hesitant & free choice" cluster and from two relatively uncommitted clusters, the ''agreeable" (or acquiescent) and the ''fence-sitters." Opinion configurations on vaccination were linked to the broader social structures of age, gender, and educational attainment, to experiences of adult vaccination, and trust in different information sources. We found that trust, distrust, and confusion about vaccination have permeated all social strata in EU countries. The pandemic years have amplified uncertainty concerning vaccine safety and its effectiveness. We also noticed a decrease of trust in the voices of mainstream medical experts during the pandemic period, from about 92 % in 2019 to 73 % in 2021, and a significant increase in people who declared that they ''don't know" whom to trust about vaccine information, ranging from 1 % to about 13 %. Measurements of vaccination confidence in Europe should control for acquiescence, through positively and negatively formulated items, and ensure comparability in time. We strongly recommend the inclusion of a battery of critical items in all future European Commission-funded surveys on vaccination to allow the monitoring of European public confidence in vaccination and in the relevant information sources, including trust in pharmaceutical companies; this will provide an avenue for re-establishing a broader confidence among citizens, health authorities, and specialists.

Contexts, 2021

In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal abo... more In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal about self and time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis shows that the self and time are related aspects of social interaction. The self is akin to a theatrical performance and our perception of time is altered by problematic circumstances.

Public Health, 2022

Objectives: We estimate patterns of covariation between COVID-19 and measles vaccination rates an... more Objectives: We estimate patterns of covariation between COVID-19 and measles vaccination rates and a set of widely used indicators of human, social, and economic capital across 146 countries. Study design: We conduct exploratory analyses of social patterns that uphold vaccination success for COVID-19 and measles. Methods: We use publicly available data on COVID vaccination rates and other country-level indicators from Our World in Data, Human Development Report, Corruption Perception Index, and the World Bank to devise bivariate correlations and multiple regression models. Results: About 70% of the variability in COVID-19 vaccination rates in February 2022 can be explained by differences in the Human Development Index (HDI) and, specifically, in life expectancy at birth. Trust in doctors and nurses adds predictive value beyond HDI, clarifying controversial discrepancies between vaccination rates in countries with similar levels of HDI and vaccine availability. Cardiovascular disease deaths, an indicator of general health system effectiveness, and infant measles immunization coverage, an indicator of country-level immunization effectiveness, are also significant, though weaker, predictors of COVID-19 vaccination success. Measles vaccination in 2019 is similarly predicted by HDI and trust in doctors and nurses. Conclusions: The remaining variability in COVID-19 vaccination success that cannot be pinned down through these sets of metrics points to a considerable scope for collective and individual agency in a time of crisis. The mobilization and coordination in the vaccination campaigns of citizens, medical professionals, scientists, journalists, and politicians, among others, account for at least some of this variability in overcoming vaccine hesitancy and inequity.

Feminist Media Studies, 2021

This paper documents the change and reproduction of gender status in the motion picture industry ... more This paper documents the change and reproduction of gender status in the motion picture industry by discussing patterns in protagonist choice and authorship of biographical films produced from 1900 to 2017. The results rely on a quantitative analysis of all 4,539 films on the IMDb platform labeled with the "Biography" tag that portray an individual main character in the selected years. We find that men-only filmmaking teams have been remarkably consistent from 1900 onward in their choice of male subjects, while mixed and women-only teams have driven an increase in the central representation of women as figures whose life is worthy of narration and remembrance. Therefore, the recently increased involvement of women as directors has significantly advanced the symbolic recognition of women in public cinematographic discourse. Our findings document the emergence of a transitional period in the biographical movie industry in which the reproduction of gender status asymmetries coexists with an increased participation of women in filmmaking.

Frontiers in Sociology, 2022

This article proposes a conceptual framework to study the social bifurcation of reality in polari... more This article proposes a conceptual framework to study the social bifurcation of reality in polarized science-trusting and science-distrusting lay worldviews, by analyzing and integrating five concepts: science work, number work, emotion work, time work, and boundary work. Despite the epistemological asymmetry between accounts relying on mainstream science and science-distrusting or denialist ones, there are symmetrical social processes contributing to the construction of lay discourses. Through conceptual analysis, we synthesize an alternative to the deficit model of contrarian discourses, replacing the model of social actors as “defective scientists” with a focus on their culturally competent agency. The proposed framework is useful for observing the parallel construction of polarized realities in interaction and their ongoing articulation through hinge objects, such as vaccines, seatbelts, guns, or sanitary masks in the Covid-19 context. We illustrate the framework through a compa...

Contexts, 2021

In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal abo... more In this article, the authors highlight their findings on online memes to see what they reveal about self and time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis shows that the self and time are related aspects of social interaction. The self is akin to a theatrical performance and our perception of time is altered by problematic circumstances.

Time & Society, 2020

In Romania, as elsewhere, there is persistent controversy surrounding homeopathy wherein various ... more In Romania, as elsewhere, there is persistent controversy surrounding homeopathy wherein various parties try to draw the boundaries of legitimate medical practice. The literature on complementary and alternative medicine features little discussion on the temporal dimensions of controversies surrounding these therapies, focusing mainly on the temporalities of the lived experience of treatment. Yet time is a powerful resource for challenging and gaining legitimacy. In order to capture the use of time as a resource for legitimating or contesting homeopathy, we advance the theory of time work by examining the rhetorical role of different temporalities in this dispute. We find that proponents and users of homeopathy appeal to temporal properties of treatment, such as the longer duration of consultation, and of healing, namely, a specific sequence of symptoms and reactions, stories of failed biomedical treatments followed by successful homeopathic interventions, and stories of durable eff...

We propose a set of six topics of inquiry into historical games as regards their feminine charact... more We propose a set of six topics of inquiry into historical games as regards their feminine characters, and we illustrate them through an analysis of This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days. Historical games may include documented historical characters and fictive characters as well; the latter may aim to represent a type of real persons, or may be individualized as a purely fictional character. We argue that This War of Mine, Valiant Hearts and 80 Days have both strong and weak points in their construction of feminine characters, when taking into account the proposed set of indicators.

2021 23rd International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic led to fast and unexpected changes in social life, including education. Ins... more The COVID-19 pandemic led to fast and unexpected changes in social life, including education. Institutions and social actors were forced to rethink school participation in order to respect social distance, but also to ensure quality in education and social order. Digital and collaborative platforms replaced the physical classrooms and mediated the virtual interaction between students and teacher. The paper contributes to the scientific debate on collaborative learning, by analyzing the challenges and opportunities encountered by Romanian students, teachers, and parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis is based on a national survey that elicits perspectives on quality and strategies of online education from 9401 students, 3265 teachers and 4269 parents. Online education has proven both an opportunity for systemic reform and a risk for social exclusion, rising concerns on how to leverage technology for extending, rather than diminishing, learning experiences.

2017 21st International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 2017

Organizations make extensive use of Big Data to classify and profile users, in order to effective... more Organizations make extensive use of Big Data to classify and profile users, in order to effectively personalize their online messages. Big Data is also increasingly relied on as a photograph of society, creating expectations of an increasingly more accurate predictive science. Yet, there are systemic challenges in using Big Data as a comprehensive source of information, and there is also public resistance. We analyze Eurobarometer survey data from April 2016 to identify actual socio-demographical limitations of online traces, charting public awareness and attitudes towards the use of online information for content personalization across the European Union.

Sociologie Romaneasca, 2020

Adapting “face-to-face” education to distance/remote and/or online education in response to the C... more Adapting “face-to-face” education to distance/remote and/or online education in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a massive challenge for countries around the world. Online education reignited older debates about inclusive education, such as hoped-for universal access versus current digital divides, prompting the public to reflect about the past, the present, and future of the educational system. This article analyzes the Romanian public discourse, both scientific and non-scientific, on emerging distance and online education in Romania during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to understand how public communication functioned as feedback for school digitalization. The paper charts the advantages and challenges of distance and online education experienced by various actors (teachers, students, and the members of civil society) or identified through scientific research, focusing on the way online education has spotlighted and reshaped social inequalities. We use thematic content...

Información del artículo Rumania: Organizarse para mejorar el entorno en un barrio marginal de Bu... more Información del artículo Rumania: Organizarse para mejorar el entorno en un barrio marginal de Bucarest.

Cyber-security concerns, experiences and protective activities are increasingly discussed not onl... more Cyber-security concerns, experiences and protective activities are increasingly discussed not only among specialists but among the general public. There is considerable variability among users, at individual and social level, in the intensity of digital activity, experience of cyber-attacks, preventive measures and concern with security. In this paper we rely on the Eurobarometer 87.4/2017 survey and we classify European Internet users in four attitudinal profiles: the avoiding, the exploratory, the wary and the aware. This empirical classification captures statistical variability and helps build a more nuanced profile of European countries, in order to adapt national policies of awareness to cybercrime.

Representations of femininity in video games and other media are often discussed with reference t... more Representations of femininity in video games and other media are often discussed with reference to the most popular games, their protagonists and their sexist predicament. This framing leaves in shadow other dimensions. We aim to identify some of them and to open a broader horizon for examining and designing femininity and gender in games. To this end we look into games with creative portrayals of feminine characters, diverging from the action-woman trope: The Walking Dead, The Path, and 80 Days. We talk in dialogue with scholars, but also with a digital crowd-critique movement for films and games, loosely centered on instruments such as the Bechdel-Wallace test and the TV Tropes.org wiki. We argue that the central analytical dimension of female character strength should be accompanied by three new axes, in order to examine feminine presence across ages, in the background fictive world created by the game, and in network edges of interaction.

Computer Law & Security Review, 2021

We study variability in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) awareness in relation to digita... more We study variability in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) awareness in relation to digital experience in the 28 European countries of EU27-UK, through secondary analysis of the Eurobarometer 91.2 survey conducted in March 2019 (N = 27,524). Education, occupation, and age are the strongest sociodemographic predictors of GDPR awareness, with little influence of gender, subjective economic well-being, or locality size. Digital experience is significantly and positively correlated with GDPR awareness in a linear model, but this relationship proves to be more complex when we examine it through a typological analysis. Using an exploratory k-means cluster analysis we identify four clusters of digital citizenship, across both dimensions of digital experience and GDPR awareness: the off-line citizens (22%), the social netizens (32%), the web citizens (17%), and the data citizens (29%). The off-line citizens rank lowest in internet use and GDPR awareness; the web citizens rank at abou...

American journal of therapeutics, Jan 27, 2017

We discuss homeopathy's placebo effect as the result of a distributed therapeutic agency invo... more We discuss homeopathy's placebo effect as the result of a distributed therapeutic agency involving humans, objects, and texts. Homeopathy has been involved in controversies for centuries, and the dispute whether it is therapy or quackery is as lively as ever. Still, homeopathy has retained significant popularity and acceptance within the medical establishment. We bracket the issue of biochemical effectiveness of homeopathic remedies as we only discuss homeopathy's potential to elicit a placebo response within its therapeutic alliance, in virtue of its social, symbolic, and material features. The review is based on literature discussing homeopathic effectiveness, including historical, biographical, sociological, and epistemological perspectives. We build upon research that clarifies the therapeutic relationship, examining its activities and meanings for practitioners and patients. Previous analyses discussing homeopathy's placebo effect stress the importance of the indivi...

Compaso, 2022

Compaso - Journal of Comparative Research in Sociology and Anthropology CALL FOR PAPERS: SOCIAL I... more Compaso - Journal of Comparative Research in Sociology and Anthropology
CALL FOR PAPERS: SOCIAL INEQUALITY AT THE CROSSROADS
We invite articles, research notes, essays and book reviews that discuss how the phenomenon of social inequality is created and recreated in the context of accelerated social changes and critical junctures. We welcome texts from multiple disciplines and genres.

Deadline for manuscript submissions: November 30th, 2022

Send manuscripts at compaso@compaso.eu.