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Sociology has a long and ambivalent relationship with the literary and aesthetic form. Commonsense readings of the novel assume its unproblematic structure as a linear narrative. Yet every novel alerts its readers to the constructed nature of social reality and identifies many of the effects of power, privilege, gender, class, desire, resistance, subversion and so on. As such a novel has the capacity to force a confrontation with fundamental, and Jameson (1981) would suggest, enduring human concerns. The novel can strip away a sense of familiarity with everyday habits, and in so doing, it can replicate the sociological process of denaturalization or defamiliarization, and allow the reader to see how ideas come to circulate, dominate and frame the ordinary world. Accordingly, David Lodge comes to the conclusion that “narrative is one of the fundamental human tools for making sense of the world.”

By examining a controversial and much debated novel like American Psycho around which a great deal of social commentary already exists, and by applying the arguments of Lodge, Jameson and others, we understand better how a work of art simultaneously functions as a deconstructive tool of the social. On this basis, when American Psycho generated a great deal of cultural anxiety in the cultural commentators of the day, it suggests that it had succeeded in denaturalizing the world, and in revealing the residual violence in an affluent, comfortable citizenry that was not expected to harbor such hostilities. American Psycho presented a disturbing “symptomatology of the times.” This capacity of the popular novel to inform on the zeitgeist makes an author such as Bret Easton Ellis a maven of our times whose products we should thus incorporate into the conceptual tool kit of any formal human studies.

In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho stunned both the cinema-going public and critics alike. Its tale of a young, genial, likeable and mother-fixated hotel proprietor – Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins) – whose psychotic tendencies and fractured personality tapped into the zeitgeist of an America changing in a post-World War II world, was very much the antithesis of rock ‘n’ roll rebels like Elvis Presley and James Dean. Norman Bates was Anthony Perkins and Anthony Perkins was Norman Bates.

In 2013, Norman resurfaced from numerous remakes in Bates Motel. With its nod to the past, and a look to the future of how Norman’s story pans out, the series’ narratives, characters and situations showed there was life for him, his mother and the motel beyond cinema.

This chapter examines how Creed’s ideas of ‘Monstrous’ can be overlaid onto Norman, his mother Norman and Bates Motel.

Nuclear proliferation in Asia is basically rooted in psycho-cultural complexes of their ruling elites who are engaged in a frantic search for national security, national identity, and influence by developing n-weapon capability. A propensity for acquiring a credible nuclear deterrence as a security guarantee against any potential threat from adverse or hostile neighbours, political and military elites in volatile regions such as South Asia, Middle East, and Northeast Asia are perpetually indulged in producing artificially insecurity syndrome among their people to legitimize the imperative of nuclear weapon building programme. Inter-Asian regional nuclear collaboration, for instance, between North Korea and Pakistan, between North Korea and Myanmar, between Iran and Pakistan, between Pakistan and China are alarming signs of fomenting the nuclear armament and missile race in Asia. Alexei Arbatov, Director of the Centre of International Security, Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Sciences; writes that with the ceasing of ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the two superpowers, nuclear proliferation has gained momentum in the horizontal proliferation in countries of volatile regions of Asia – India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya – with the flawed support systems of the NPT, IAEA, and Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). For instance, NPT does not offer any tangible benefits to those countries renouncing acquisition of nuclear weapons, nor does it “envision serious punishment for military nuclear activities” (Arbatov, 2004).

The Ural Mountain region is a remarkably beautiful landscape of forests and lakes. Here is the continental divide between Europe and Asia. One of the rivers originating here to eventually feed feeding the Artic Sea is the Techa river. But the verdant greenery that characterizes the region does not disclose the hidden dangers of plutonium and other radioactive materials either downstream or downwind of the Mayak Nuclear Complex. Major areas of the Techa river corridor and downwind areas were permanently evacuated after radioactive releases from the Mayak Nuclear Complex from the 1950s through the 1970s. Although acute and chronic water releases encompass this period, the so-called Kyshtim 57 accident, an air release from Mayak in 1957, was the word's worst nuclear accident until surpassed by Chernobyl (see Mironova et al. and Kutepova and Tsepilova, this volume). But what of the inhabitants who remain? In this chapter, we explore some of the psycho-social impacts of living in contaminated areas, drawing primarily upon interviews with residents of the region. In doing this, we give voice to their perspective and views on each other and life in this contaminated region.¹

This chapter explores geopolitics, garbage cans, the need for interdisciplinary insight, and the lures and limitations of one-sided mono-disciplinary conceptual models in understanding strategic decision making. We argue that a combination of the garbage can model and Nathan Leites’ psycho-cultural approach to decision making might be useful in giving insights for events and for organizational behavior. As a decision making case, we consider the 1941 decision of the Empire of Japan to declare war on the Allied Powers. We find that there could be useful lines of integration between the garbage can framework and other perspectives in geopolitical decision making. In using a historical example to illustrate the possible integration, we argue that there are inherent limits to single-model decision making approaches. Developing interdisciplinary frameworks for understanding foreign policy decision making may lead to better insights in real-world processes and seems like a step in a fruitful direction.

Possibilities for self-representation for transgender (trans) and gender non-conforming (GNC) youth must be conceptualized in relation to youths’ placement within frames of power. Powerful institutional forces in youths’ lives include schools and policing and, as is evidenced by youths’ statements, extend to mass media portrayals. Library approaches that reify the inclusion of representative texts do not adequately meet the needs of trans and GNC youth. As a profession, librarianship must reflect on ideological approaches to gendered embodiment to push against an ongoing repetition of institutional harms done to trans and GNC youth.

This chapter offers examinations of information needs, complex online worlds, and incorporation of histories made invisible by power alongside critical literacy skills as crucial aspects of providing services to all possibly or actually trans and GNC youth. It critically situates the circumstances of trans youths’ lives in relation to the effect that adult perceptions have on trans and GNC youths’ ability to access resources. It provides a framework for reflection on how young adult librarians often unconsciously limit library access by enacting gendered expectations that do not always match the possibility or actuality of youths’ experiences or self-conceptions. The chapter outlines modes of communication – through library materials, programs, community resources and partnerships – that convey deeper understandings of trans and GNC experiences to possibly or actually trans and GNC youth.

This chapter argues that environmental ethicists commit a serious error when they require that people hold a moral realist metaethical belief in the intrinsic value of non-human living things and non-living natural things in order to be able to behave in an ethically acceptable manner toward the environment.

Environmental ethics regard this position as the mandatory non-anthropocentrism one must first hold in order to be in a proper moral relationship to the environment. The main reason for seeing this requirement as an error is that it is politically unrealistic insofar most people most of the time behave in political contexts on the basis of instrumental and not intrinsic reasons. To claim that people can behave in a morally acceptable manner toward the environment if and only if they first believe in its intrinsic value is not only politically unrealistic, but also actually false.

The chapter looks at recent studies measuring the behavior of political and moral philosophers which shows that they do not behave in any markedly way better than non-moral philosophers. Ethicists, whom one can assume believe in some form or another of the mind-independent reality of moral properties, are not more morally well-behaved for holding such a belief.

Ethicists, especially environmental ethicists, are in no position to require of us to believe in the intrinsic value of the environment in order to behave in more beneficial ways toward it.

Accounting’s definition of accountability should include attributes of socioenvironmental degradation manufactured by unsustainable technologies. Beck argues that emergent accounts should reflect the following primary characteristics of technological degradation: complexity, uncertainty, and diffused responsibility. Financial stewardship accounts and probabilistic assessments of risk, which are traditionally employed to allay the public’s fear of uncontrollable technological hazards, cannot reflect these characteristics because they are constructed to perpetuate the status quo by fabricating certainty and security. The process through which safety thresholds are constructed and contested represents the ultimate form of socialized accountability because these thresholds shape how much risk people consent to be exposed to. Beck’s socialized total accountability is suggested as a way forward: It has two dimensions, extended spatiotemporal responsibility and the psychology of decision-making. These dimensions are teased out from the following constructs of Beck’s Risk Society thesis: manufactured risks and hazards, organized irresponsibility, politics of risk, radical individualization and social learning. These dimensions are then used to critically evaluate the capacity of full cost accounting (FCA), and two emergent socialized risk accounts, to integrate the multiple attributes of sustainability. This critique should inform the journey of constructing more representative accounts of technological degradation.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the gender dynamics of the juncture of migration and health in the case of Ecuadorean migrations to Spain, the United States, and back.

By building on a feminist intersectional take on the social determination of health as defined by Latin American critical epidemiology, the project was designed within an activist research framework, and data were collected transnationally from 2015 to 2019 via surveys, individual and group interviews, participant observation in health and migration workshops and trainings for migrant communities, advocates, and health practitioners.

Our study identified and conceptualized various health processes and psycho-sociocultural coping mechanisms that migrants and relatives traversed and employed and pointed to how they manifested their agency in sustaining, reinforcing, and challenging dominant heteropatriarchal gender regimes.

While the findings cannot be generalized to all Ecuadorean migrants given sampling limitations, our research can help migrant communities further understand how their health and well-being may be affected by migration and, in turn, take precautionary and restorative measures.

The combination of various critical theories allowed us to uncover how migration as a risk factor affected the health of migrants, nonmigrating relatives and returnees in a nuanced and complex manner that traversed disciplinary silos and challenged both the mainstream biomedical approach, which typically exoticize, demean, and/or marginalize migrant health, and the literature's tendency to code migrants as victims as opposed to recognizing their protagonism.