Looking for Determinants of Ontological Security in the Spain of the Crisis

The concept of ontological security has a remarkable echo in the current sociology to describe emotional status of men of late modernity. However, the concept created by Giddens in the eighties has been little used in empirical research covering various sources of risk or uncertainty. In this paper, a scale for ontological security is proposed. To do this, we start from the results of a research focused on the relationship between risk, uncertainty and vulnerability in the context of the economic crisis in Spain. These results were produced through nine focus groups and a telephone survey with standardized questionnaire applied to a national sample of 2,408 individuals over 18 years. This work is divided into three main sections. In the fi rst, a scale has been built from the results of the application of different items present in the questionnaire used. The second part explores the relationships of the scale obtained with the variables further approximate the emotional dimensions of individuals. The third part observes the variables that contribute to changes in the scale: These variables show the structural feature of the ontological security.

Mobility and security: the perceived benefits of citizenship for resettled young people from refugee backgrounds

In recent decades, the meaning and value of formal state citizenship has shifted dramatically. In the same period, scholarship on citizenship has drawn attention to the proliferation of alternative forms of sub-, supra- and transnational citizenship, at times obscuring the ongoing importance of formal state citizenship. For refugees, however, formal state citizenship remains a critical and widely shared goal. Drawing on interviews with 51 young people from refugee backgrounds in Melbourne, Australia, this article explores the intersecting themes of mobility and security that were identified by participants as the most important benefits of acquiring formal state citizenship in the country of resettlement. In contrast to the insecurity of forced migration, formal state citizenship provides a privileged mobility that enables refugee-background youth to maintain and create transnational identities and attachments and to be protected while doing so, while also granting a secure status within the nation state and insurance against further displacement in an uncertain future. In offering these forms of mobility and security, formal state citizenship contributes to a sense of ontological security among refugee-background youth, providing an important foundation for building national and transnational futures.

Knowledge, identity, and dilemmas of the self in physical education teacher education

This study draws on an eclectic range of influences. The early research was guided by the traditions of Personal Construct Theory. The study was later extended by drawing on theoretical tenets of social constructionism and the notion of the Saturated Self and Anthony Gidden's work on structuration and his later work on self identity. This has provided a new way of investigating how becoming a PE teacher through constructed knowledge established a professional identity. The data suggest that during the process of constructing professional knowledge, the students forge their identities by establishing 'position' and 'role'. In doing so, the participants in this study experienced a series of dilemmas of professional self. These dilemmas are a product of what Giddens calls high modernity and what Gergen refers to as postmodernity. It seems that to become a PE teacher, the dilemmas must be worked through until a position of ontological security has been achieved. For some this was profoundly difficult. In spite of this, the methods of study allowed the participants to begin to articulate their theories and visions of teaching physical education, and the therapeutic qualities of Kelly's theory encouraged many of the students to 'see it differently' (Rossi, 1997) and to begin to develop a rationale for professional work in physical education based on socially just practices.

Corporeidade e segurança ontológica no contexto padronizador do mercado

Nesta tese, falamos do corpo construído socialmente, vinculado à subjetividade e à identidade do indivíduo e que está impregnado por elementos sociais e culturais. Para Giddens (2009), o controle do corpo é fundamental para que o indivíduo preserve aquilo que o autor chama de segurança ontológica – ou seja, para que ele tenha um sentido pessoal para a vida e pontos de referência que o ajudem a seguir adiante no cotidiano. Na cultura de consumo, sua aparência tende a ser normatizada e o culto ao corpo, entre outros aspectos, tem o apelo de autoindulgência. Nosso objetivo principal é compreender, dentro de um contexto de normatividade estética, o discurso e as práticas de consumo dos indivíduos em relação ao próprio corpo, identificando de que modo isso se conecta à sua segurança ontológica. Para alcançar esse objetivo, procuramos: (a) entender o olhar o indivíduo em relação a seu próprio corpo, avaliando de que forma isso tem relação com sua segurança ontológica; (b) examinar a presença do mercado no tripé indivíduo-corpo-segurança ontológica; (c) identificar e analisar elementos discursivos relacionados à aparência física, procurando entender o papel do consumo nesse contexto e (d) investigar as motivações que levam o indivíduo a agir ou não em conformidade com a norma estética, analisando as práticas de consumo relacionadas ao corpo. A coleta de dados primários foi feita por meio de entrevistas qualitativas. Foram entrevistados homens e mulheres, de atividades profissionais variadas, de 18 a 50 anos, pertencentes às classes A, B e C (ABEP, 2012), todos eles residentes no Rio de Janeiro. Este campo aconteceu no período de outubro de 2012 a julho de 2013. Os dados foram analisados a partir da abordagem de análise do discurso, considerando-se sua linha francesa e, particularmente a visão pecheutiana. Esta pesquisa conclui, em linha com autores como Giddens (2002), Goffman (1978) e Schouten (1991), que o corpo é algo importante na noção do indivíduo sobre si mesmo e faz parte de sua construção identitária. Além disso, a maneira como o sujeito lida com a mensagem normativa do mercado traz indícios sobre sua segurança ontológica. O indivíduo ontologicamente seguro não é aquele que descarta o mercado e cujas práticas de consumo relativas ao corpo fogem à norma estética. O que o diferencia daquele cuja segurança ontológica é frágil é sua motivação para aderir a determinado estímulo e a forma como ele lida com essas escolhas de consumo. Depreendemos que o indivíduo com segurança ontológica tem menos ansiedade em suas opções relativas ao corpo e não tem o olhar do outro como uma sombra quando toma decisões sobre sua própria aparência. Diferentemente, os indivíduos sem segurança ontológica são mais ansiosos diante da mensagem do mercado. Há, em algum grau, sofrimento quando não atendem a norma estética e, portanto, a aparência do corpo ganha um espaço importante em suas vidas.

A racionalização das tradições na modernidade: o diálogo entre Anthony Giddens e Jürgen Habermas

Based on the reflections of Habermas and his conception of modernity, understood as an unfinished project, Giddens stresses that in all societies the maintenance of personal identity and its connection to broader social identities is a primordial requirement for ontological security. To achieve ontological security, modernity had to (re) invent traditions and get away from genuine traditions, that is, those values radically linked to the pre-modern past. This is a character of the discontinuity of modernity, the separation between what is presented as the new and that which persists as the legacy of the old. This article discusses the relationship between tradition and modernity and the dialogue between Giddens and Habermas. The goal is to identify the points of contact and the differences in the theses defended by both authors, in order to assess their contributions to discussions of the rationalization of contemporary societies. Late or reflexive modernity is an uninterrupted process of changes that affect the foundations of Western society. Faced with a reality of constant change, it is necessary to choose between the certainty of the past and a new reality of continuous change. In this sense, and according to the Habermasian perspective, the reflexive character of modernity is found in this process of choosing between the certainties inherited from the past and new social forms, a process that that leads to the reflection on - or even the recasting of - social practices, causing the rationalization and (re) invention of various aspects of life in society.

Securing Disunion: young people’s nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland.

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014.  We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literatures from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children’s emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign. Keywords: nationalism, young people, race and ethnicity, ontological security, everyday geopolitics

Enhancing Food Sovereignty and Food Security through the Revitalization of Indigenous Knowledge: Experiences from the Bolivian Andes

Endogenous development is defined as development that values primarily locally available resources and the way people organized themselves for that purpose. It is a dynamic and evolving concept that also embraces innovations and complementation from other than endogenous sources of knowledge; however, only as far as they are based on mutual respect and the recognition of cultural and socioeconomic self-determination of each of the parties involved. Experiences that have been systematized in the context of the BioAndes Program are demonstrating that enhancing food security and food sovereignty on the basis of endogenous development can be best achieved by applying a ‘biocultural’ perspective: This means to promote and support actions that are simultaneously valuing biological (fauna, flora, soils, or agrobiodiversity) and sociocultural resources (forms of social organization, local knowledge and skills, norms, and the related worldviews). In Bolivia, that is one of the Latin-American countries with the highest levels of poverty (79% of the rural population) and undernourishment (22% of the total population), the Program BioAndes promotes food sovereignty and food security by revitalizing the knowledge of Andean indigenous people and strengthening their livelihood strategies. This starts by recognizing that Andean people have developed complex strategies to constantly adapt to highly diverse and changing socioenvironmental conditions. These strategies are characterized by organizing the communities, land use and livelihoods along a vertical gradient of the available eco-climatic zones; the resulting agricultural systems are evolving around the own sociocultural values of reciprocity and mutual cooperation, giving thus access to an extensive variety of food, fiber and energy sources. As the influences of markets, competition or individualization are increasingly affecting the life in the communities, people became aware of the need to find a new balance between endogenous and exogenous forms of knowledge. In this context, BioAndes starts by recognizing the wealth and potentials of local practices and aims to integrate its actions into the ongoing endogenous processes of innovation and adaptation. In order to avoid external impositions and biases, the program intervenes on the basis of a dialogue between exogenous, mainly scientific, and indigenous forms of knowledge. The paper presents an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of enhancing endogenous development through a dialogue between scientific and indigenous knowledge by specifically focusing on its effects on food sovereignty and food security in three ‘biocultural’ rural areas of the Bolivian highlands. The paper shows how the dialogue between different forms of knowledge evolved alongside the following project activities: 1) recuperation and renovation of local seeds and crop varieties (potato – Solanum spp., quinoa – Chenopodium quinoa, cañahua – Chenopodium pallidicaule); 2) support for the elaboration of community-based norms and regulations for governing access and distribution of non-timber forest products, such as medicinal, fodder, and construction plants; 3) revitalization of ethnoveterinary knowledge for sheep and llama breeding; 4) improvement of local knowledge about the transformation of food products (sheep-cheese, lacayote – Cucurbita sp. - jam, dried llama meat, fours of cañahua and other Andean crops). The implementation of these activities fostered the community-based livelihoods of indigenous people by complementing them with carefully and jointly designed innovations based on internal and external sources of knowledge and resources. Through this process, the epistemological and ontological basis that underlies local practices was made visible. On this basis, local and external actors started to jointly define a renewed concept of food security and food sovereignty that, while oriented in the notions of well being according to a collectively re-crafted world view, was incorporating external contributions as well. Enabling and hindering factors, actors and conditions of these processes are discussed in the paper.

Context obfuscation for privacy via ontological descriptions

Context information is used by pervasive networking and context-aware programs to adapt intelligently to different environments and user tasks. As the context information is potentially sensitive, it is often necessary to provide privacy protection mechanisms for users. These mechanisms are intended to prevent breaches of user privacy through unauthorised context disclosure. To be effective, such mechanisms should not only support user specified context disclosure rules, but also the disclosure of context at different granularities. In this paper we describe a new obfuscation mechanism that can adjust the granularity of different types of context information to meet disclosure requirements stated by the owner of the context information. These requirements are specified using a preference model we developed previously and have since extended to provide granularity control. The obfuscation process is supported by our novel use of ontological descriptions that capture the granularity relationship between instances of an object type.