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All values are really paradoxes since they are contrasts, like courage–caution, diversity–inclusion and define one another. Values are differences at the end of continua. All metaphors are paradoxical being both like and unlike that to which they refer. Emergency management is a paradox. How can you manage something suddenly emerging like Australian bush fires? It is, however, possible to prepare for a range of events, all infections require masks, social distancing, gowns, disinfectant etc. Many East Asians countries have navigated the current COVID-19 pandemic better than many Western countries by such readiness. The key to resolving paradoxes is dynamic equilibrium, wherein opposed values harmonize and grow ever more salient. All innovation is an exercise in resolving paradox, by creating new wholes out of old and existing parts. These ideas are explored via a commentary of three pieces on paradox in relation to logic, Luhman and emergency management.

This tribute essay to Laurel Richardson’s work is composed of a collection poems that respond to her own call for and use of the poetic in sociological and ethnographic research. The piece is divided into four sections (Poeticizing Theory, Poems on Academic Life, Love Poems, and Poems of Evaluation), each with the intent of employing poetry as a creative analytic practice so that I and the reader might take in more fully Richardson’s scholarship.

The play text, You Strike the Woman, You Strike the Rock, (Klotz, 1994) takes its title from a protest slogan ‘Wathint Abafazi’Wathint’. This slogan is associated with the Women’s Protest March in 1956, the largest mass gathering of women in South African herstory where women gathered to demonstrate peacefully against the imposition of pass laws on black South African women. The play recalls the story of the Women’s March and their courage as they fought against the imposition of the pass laws and is based on the lives of three women, Sdudla, Mampompo and Mambhele who sell chickens, vetkoek and oranges near a taxi rank in the squatter camp of Crossroads in Cape Town. Sdudla is the political activist who tries throughout the play to politicise both Mampompo and Mamphlele by making frequent references to the Women’s March and recalling the defiance and strength of the women who went on that March. What You Strike the Woman You Strike the Rock does is firstly to emphasise and explore the personal experiences, and perspectives of three women and, importantly, to represent a break from tradition, secondly to use consciousness-raising as a way for the women to talk about their experiences; to offer their testimony and, thirdly, to use the process as a bonding experience.

This study uses ethnographic methods to explore the discursive practices that give life to ethnic restaurants, establishing identity, and addressing community engagement. Employing postcolonial and postmodern perspectives that discuss discursive practices of hybridity, authenticity, and commoditization, the research focused on five culture-specific restaurants: Irish, Italian, Korean, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern. The restaurants' stories are studied through observation, interviews, and the situated approach as discussed by Denzin (1994). The findings suggest that some restaurants openly embraced hybridity, defied and debunked stereotypes, and resisted hegemonic constructions of individuals and of culture by enacting narratives of defiance, while others attempted to maintain traditional images or commodify the culture. Using the situated approach revealed a post-postcolonial tension between certain restaurants within the community.

The study of accounts, corrective practices, or aligning actions has grown to constitute a significant sub-discipline within everyday life sociology. Most work in this field starts with an assumption of order and assumes that accounts reestablish broken sociality. However, much accounting activity resists against alignment efforts, and alignment efforts can be used as a means of conflict. The present chapter aims to survey situations in which actors resist and negotiate alignment and the power and status conflicts involved in these negotiations. With these conflicts, participants also negotiate responsibility, which is here seen not as an internal attribute of actors, but a socially negotiated meaning as well. On a larger level, the present chapter shows how levels of meaning are intertwined in alignment situations, making them much more than mere tools to produce and protect order.

Through an analysis of the French crown's investigation into the greatest scandal of Louis XIV's reign, this article examines the unstable boundary between sin and crime at the height of the Catholic Reformation in France. The prosecution of the suspects in the Affair of the Poisons, it argues, allowed a key change in the French state's definition of crime. In 1682, the crown decriminalized magic. It continued to prosecute “so-called magicians,” however, because their practices were deemed sacrilegious. Any person convicted of “treason against God” was therefore sentenced to the most severe form of execution inflicted under French law: to be burnt alive. Louis XIV's determination to ensure social order and religious orthodoxy was made manifest in the state's rituals of punishment.