terms - chapter 1 (Čapek)

The Social Construction of Nature: Of Computers, Butterflies, Dogs, and Trucks

disembedding

Social relations “lifted out” of their local contexts and restructured across time and space.

sociological imagination

the ability to see how individual experiences connect to broader historical and social structures. differentiation between “personal troubles” and “public issues”

distanciation

The notion that global economies and electronic communication networks connect us to physically absent people in places that are geographically remote from us.

implosion

The process of one social phenomenon collapsing, or contracting, into another—for example, the merging of the categories of being “at home” and “shopping.”

naturework

The process of interpreting nature through cultural ideas. How we constantly work to transform “nature” into culture, filtering it through the screen of social meanings that we have learned.

symbolic interactionism

A micro-level sociological theory that studies the symbolic meaning of social interaction and how the self is formed through such interaction.

Human Exemptionalist Paradigm (HEP)

The worldview that believes that humans are above nature and not subject to natural laws.

New Ecological Paradigm (NEP)

The idea that social systems must be understood in relationship to their dynamic interactions with the natural world, and that humans are ecologically interdependent with other species.