Sociology
Tahereh Khazaei
Abstract
The expansion of the virtual space and communication networks has changed Iranian society by providing a sphere for constructing personalized narratives of the social lifeworld. Physicians are a social class with a dubious presence in the virtual space, especially on X. The genealogy of medicine ...
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The expansion of the virtual space and communication networks has changed Iranian society by providing a sphere for constructing personalized narratives of the social lifeworld. Physicians are a social class with a dubious presence in the virtual space, especially on X. The genealogy of medicine is known as an institution professionally entwined with ambiguity, authority, and authenticity. On the other hand, the modern world is characterized by deconsecrating and demystification. The current research is a netnography that relies on verstehen to understand the physicians’ twits on the X social medium in 2023. The four dominant conceptual patterns extracted in our thematic analysis include the emergence of the patient subject and the interpellation of the doctor, fearfulness about the emergence of traditional medicine that de-monopolizes health, the physician’s constructs from mafia to the martyr of health, and the unactualized alienation of the physician. Overall, the expansion of virtual social media has accelerated the physicians’ disempowerment and demystification as a result of which the sacred, ambiguous aura around the physician has encountered a call to the center, providing the reflexive narration of the physician, his lifeworld, and his problems.Keywords: Reflexivity, Virtual Space, Physician’s Lifeworld, X (Twitter), Iranian Society. IntroductionToday, social media and the virtual space compete with the physical world as one of the main spheres of modern life. Providing people with shared interests to gather around each other via the possibility of visual and written dialogue, the virtual space has introduced new experiences of constructing and narrating the self. Despite their widespread filtering, Telegram, Instagram, and X are among the most popular social media in Iran. Among other social classes in Iran, physicians have a distinct presence in X as an elite social medium.As an expert institution, medicine is of high status, authenticity, authority, and income. In cosmologic worldviews, disease and medicine are connected to mythical and metaphysical beliefs as well as concepts such as destiny, magic, and enchantment, while in the theological worldview, they pertain to God’s wrath and atonement of sins, and in popular culture, they are connected to healing and miracle (Salehi, Zokai & Ekhlasi, 2019; Adam, Herzlich, 2006; Masoudnia, 2010; Svenaeus, 2021). In Islamic beliefs, the physician is revered as God’s hand that heals (Mohaghegh Damad, 2016; Sadr, 2011; Kiyani, 2012). With such a genealogy that rivals bordering professions such as Traditional medicine, medicine finds mysterious, latent characteristics that distinguish it from the non-physician others while even the emergence of modern medicine has not removed the sacred, metaphysical, mysterious aura that it is traditionally endowed with. Following widespread social changes, medicine and physicians have faced a call to the center and to self-narration in the communicative sphere that social media provides. Though the process is global in scope, it pertains to specific Iranian particularities that go back to the simultaneous paradoxical claim of traditional medicine to scientific and Islamic originality and the duality of the science/medicine vis-à-vis culture and politics in the Iranian polemic society.Research Question(s)In this research, we answer two questions: what is the physicians’ narrative of medicine and their lifeworld in the X (Twitter) social media? How is this narrative framed and in what conceptual pattern is it interpreted?Literature ReviewFollowing the deinstitutionalization and detraditionalization of all traditional and premodern institutions, and the limiting and threatening of the validity and authority of meaning and images constructed by them (Martuccelli, 2002; Martuccelli and de Singly, 2012), the physician and medicine as the legacy of both tradition and modernity that carry an aura of ambiguity, magic, and sanctity are no exempt from rethinking and reconstructing their images and narratives. The process of disempowering medicine found momentum with the initial attempts at understanding it as a science with material, earthly, and learned skills around the body (Salehi, 2019) that in the late 20th century faced uncertainties about the novel medicalization methods (Starr, 1982), critics of the pathogenicity of modern medicine (Illich, 1976 and 1975) and the capability of modern medicine in healing in contemporary society. With medicine’s authority under challenge, the subject of medicine was interpellated in the sense that the physician was summoned to give an account of himself as an opportunity open to the once impossible experience of realizing the individual self as the reflexive self (Martuccelli de Singly, 2012). With the physician called to the center to self-narrate, social media turned into a major context for the narration of the physician’s social lifeworld.Materials and MethodsThe theoretical approach of this research is verstehen, the field and object of the research are chosen using netnography (Kozinets, 2006), and classic thematic analysis is used for the analysis of findings. The field includes the twits of 50 Iranian general practitioners and professional doctors (male and female) in 2023 in the X social media that center on narrating their experiences and analyses relevant to medicine in Iran.ResultsThe emergence of the patient and the interpellation of the physician (the increased medical knowledge of the patient, state’s intervention in providing cheap medical services, insurance agents and the evaluation of the physicians’ merits), fearfulness of the emergence of traditional discourse and the demonopolization of medicine (criticizing the university for legitimating traditional medicine, criticizing the state for defining policies in favor of Islamic medicine, delegitimizing the outdated methods of traditional medicine as the instance of fraud), the construction of the physician’s image in the two extremes of mafia and health martyr (the profit-making nature of medicine and its desanctifiication, self-interested medicine as against the historical and cultural genealogy) and the physician’s unactualized self (the experience of medicine in the cleavage between reality and the constructed image, boredom in the experience of medicine, the lack of context for practicing the learnt knowledge and the resulting alienation in the personal experience of physicians) are the dominant meaning patterns in the analysis of twits. Information Table of Doctors and their Pages in X Communication NetworkMedical Verification/ Medical NumberMedical ExpertiseGenderX AccountNumberFollowers - content of tweetsNeurosurgeonMale @kazemo_sarp1Followers - content of tweetsSurgeonMale @pedipayam2n.m.: 134915General Physician Male @RLaripour3n.m.: 21194NeurologistMale @drbabakzamani4n.m.: 22513Vascular and Trauma SurgeonMale @MrZafarghandi5n.m.: 91913OncologistMale @OmidrezaieDr6Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Male @k_md_297Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Female@Drshahrzad808Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Male @drcitalopram9Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Male @sheykholtabib10Followers - content of tweetsOrthopedistMale @Mahmouddream111Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Male @khodesheh12n.m.: 149053General Physician Male @smmirkhani13Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Male @Azimut140014n.m.: 77415General Physician Male @SMoattar15Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Female@thecatloverrr16Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Male @MahdiR8638832417Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Female@negarmr9618Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Male @litt_lebowski19Followers - content of tweetsKnee SurgeonMale @rasulghm20Followers - content of tweetsInternistMale @Dr_reza_safaei21Followers - content of tweetsGeneral Physician Female@faryadbseda22n.m.: 104691AnesthesiologistMale @e_bastan23Followers - content of tweetsGeneral SurgeonMale @RPORED4/ RPO24Followers - content of tweetsNeurologistMale @Naseh Mohi25Followers - content of tweetsGeneral PhysicianMale @rhamed3226Followers - content of tweetsNeurosurgeonMale @sm_sinuhe27Followers - content of tweetsSurgeonMale @Mahmouddeream128n.m.: 31395NeurologistMale @JavadAmeliMD29n.m.: 108208Breast SurgeonMale @drhamidahmadi30Followers - content of tweetsRadiologistMale @legendoffall_31Followers - content of tweetsCardiologistMale @rezaaa198632Followers - content of tweetsGeneral PhysicianMale @NimaValiollah33n.m.: 129155AnesthesiologistMale @Amirhos1009613434Followers - content of tweetsGeneral PhysicianMale @poetofdoctors35Followers - content of tweetsGeneral PhysicianMale @ehsan7j36n.m.: 140597InternistMale @dfereydoonzadeh37Followers - content of tweetsInternistMale @cinnora6038Followers - content of tweetsGeneral PhysicianMale @CardiacTabib39Followers - content of tweetsRenal SurgeonMale @father6469902940Followers - content of tweetsGeneral PhysicianMale @abolfazl_hm41n.m.: 55904Renal SurgeonMale @aliboskabady42Followers - content of tweetsEye SurgeonMale @mojtaba8130551743Followers - content of tweetsEndocrinologistFemale@Drabandokht44Followers - content of tweetsGeneral PhysicianMale @sarmadnou45n.m.: 129153OphthalmologistMale @abdulrahimami1146Followers - content of tweetsUrologistMale @monsoeursepehr47n.m.: 118864General PhysicianMale @mahdiarSaeedian48Followers - content of tweetsGeneral SurgeonMale @usiriss49n.m.: 161611General PhysicianFemale@Kamranifaeze150 ConclusionWith the expansion of the virtual space, the presence of doctors for protecting their authority, constructing meaning, and maintaining change in social intersubjectivity is inevitable. This presence is a shift from a monologue communication, neglecting and not listening, to dialogue with oneself, threatening others, and limiting the power of medicine. In a metaphoric sense, the physicians were, in their cultural and historical genealogy, the inhabitants of impenetrable fortresses whose doors were closed to outsiders. The hegemony of medicine entwined with myth, magic, and metaphysical matter had made the physician needless to speak out himself. With the advent of social changes and the demystification and desanctification of medicine and the physician, however, the foundations of the fortress trembled, and the physician was summoned to the center. He should have come down from his castle to an equal footing with others to narrate his medical lifeworld and himself. The expansion of the virtual space has led to the formation of the network society which is an accessible, non-hierarchical, intimate, and equal space against the traditional society. Talking of himself in the virtual space and criticizing medicine in the intersubjectivity of Iranian society, the physician attempts to preserve his authority while at the same time presenting a more real image of himself to give a diverse, varied image of medicine that dismantles the traditional homogenized image.
Tahereh Khazaei
Abstract
Cancer is a social phenomenon with plural social realities arising from the experience and comprehension of people engaged with it. This research is conducted based on 43 in-depth, semi-structured interviews (with 10 cancer patients, 10 family members, and 23 healthcare staff including nurses, oncologists, ...
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Cancer is a social phenomenon with plural social realities arising from the experience and comprehension of people engaged with it. This research is conducted based on 43 in-depth, semi-structured interviews (with 10 cancer patients, 10 family members, and 23 healthcare staff including nurses, oncologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists) in Isfahan’s major cancer treatment center. The approach of the study is phenomenology accommodated by interpretive sociology, the method is basic qualitative research, the sampling technique is purposive combined with complementary, and the analytical technique is thematic analysis. The analysis of people’s narratives is conductive to five themes of dealing with cancer from laxity to subjectivity, patient’s bodily objectivity in redefining the daily life order, the binary of home/hospital and the patient’s spatial and social bewilderment, patient’s alienation under the other’s authority of the physician, and patient as an integrated whole in the nursing care system. Overall, while the Iranian narrative has its own particularities, it complies with the universal intersubjective comprehension of cancer in which the dominant intersubjective construct about cancer is rather shaped by the popular comprehensions (Reconstructing the basic idea of cancer as death and mortality) than the physicians’ authority.
Tahereh Khazaei
Abstract
Despite its widespread use as an equivalent for immigrant populations, the term diaspora remains semantically and theoretically ambiguous. This study hypothesizes that the term diaspora fails to represent Iranian immigration and its divergent heterogeneities. Discussing theoretical approaches to diaspora, ...
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Despite its widespread use as an equivalent for immigrant populations, the term diaspora remains semantically and theoretically ambiguous. This study hypothesizes that the term diaspora fails to represent Iranian immigration and its divergent heterogeneities. Discussing theoretical approaches to diaspora, the characteristics of Iranian immigration, and the findings of interviews with forty young Iranian immigrants living in France, the present study attempts to offer a more suitable alternative to the term diaspora. It will be revealed that the heterogeneity of Iranian immigration in causes, conception of immigration experience, as well as disinclination to create a unified community in host countries, leads Iranians living outside their country to form small and scattered clusters and live on isolated islands. The term proposed to be used in lieu of diaspora is “archipelago ethnicity”, which shows both the heterogeneity and divergence in Iranian immigration in general and represents the only connection between the scattered and isolated islands, i.e., being Iranian.
Sociology
Tahereh Khazaei
Abstract
The present research is aimed at understanding the experiences of Iranian women in France as immigrants regarding their body and dress norms. The study was conducted based on a comprehensive sociological analysis of the work of individuation of social actors and through a comprehensive survey and thematic ...
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The present research is aimed at understanding the experiences of Iranian women in France as immigrants regarding their body and dress norms. The study was conducted based on a comprehensive sociological analysis of the work of individuation of social actors and through a comprehensive survey and thematic analysis. Deep semi-structured talks were held with the participants, composed of 24 Iranian women aged between 26 to 42 years old who had been living between one to 15 years in France. The results indicate that there are four types of comprehension of the body, including comprehension of the body as an aesthetic, banal, emancipatory and sexual object. Also, three strategies were recognized including integration, differentiation and singularization in the immigration interview. In the process of making their feminine selves reach hegemonic feminity with their dressing codification, the women have different experiences ranging from adaptation to consistent syncretization of French and Iranian dressing codes and heterogeneous norms.
