Studies in the field of human–animal interaction tend to highlight the positive results of the influence of animals on humans, which supports the popular belief that the human–animal bond positively affects humans’ well-being (“pet-effect”). Nevertheless, contradictory results exist that seem especially visible since the COVID-19 pandemic, a prominent external stressor. Despite critical findings, individuals seem to want to believe in the beneficial effects of the human–animal relationship (“pet-effect paradox”). Based on this background, the present study aims to investigate this phenomenon using a mixed-method design. Therefore, animal caregivers were surveyed online and compared using psychometric measurements and open-ended questions. In this context, a special focus was placed on the additional stressor of Long-Covid and related concerns. The results demonstrate once more the existence of the “pet-effect paradox” due to a contradiction in the quantitative and qualitative results. At a quantitative level, the findings show additional burdens on animal caregivers who are confronted with multiple loads. However, the qualitative results indicate a belief in the beneficial effects of pets at the biopsychosocial level. Additionally, the data demonstrate a shift in focus away from the environment to oneself when affected by Long-Covid, which might affect the ability to care for an animal.

More than ever, ‘the headscarf’ is a dominant trope in contemporary ‘Western’ discourses on migration. Within controversies on Muslim ‘others’, ethnicity and gender frequently interweave. In discussions about the Muslim woman, a problematic dichotomy frequently emerges: namely the representation of a Muslim woman who wears the headscarf and is seen as ‘oppressed’ or ‘traditional’. This is opposed to the position of a Muslim woman who does not wear the headscarf and is simultaneously considered a ‘self-determined’ or ‘modern’ Muslim woman. Against this backdrop, this contribution adopts a critical perspective on dichotomising discourses on Muslim women’s practices in relation to wearing the headscarf. In this article the authors examine narrative interviews with four Muslim women, focusing on their subjective experiences and psychological coping strategies with dichotomous and dichotomising stereotypes. An in-depth qualitative analysis shows that these women display a need to constantly justify and negotiate their own positions in relation to wearing the headscarf, regardless of whether the interviewed women actually wear a headscarf or not. Based on this, the authors identify different psychological coping strategies and discuss them critically in a wider framework that draws attention to existing social hierarchies.

Within “Western” controversies, the headscarf is stylised as a symbol of “oppression” and “backwardness” while “unveiling” is simultaneously associated with “self-determination” and “modernity”. As object of a critical discourse analysis, this dichotomisation was also found in Austrian women’s magazines; “the veiled” Muslim woman was constructed as “traditional” and appeared mostly as an “object” of speech. “The unveiled” woman, however, was more frequently featured directly in interviews, typically thematising “modern”—i.e., “Western” assimilated—lifestyles and ways of dressing. Strikingly however, by drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of subalternity, we conclude that also the more “visible” or “hearable” discourse position—even if it seems to provide Muslim women with agency at first glance—similarly colludes in a further silencing of Muslim women.

Current media discourses on femininity and gender-equality in the Global North recur heavily on a rhetoric of choice, the repudiation of feminism and an already-established gender equality. From cultural- and social-theoretical points of view, however, scholars have developed a postfeminist critique that exposes this trope as a mask of “the continued existence of gender hierarchies” (McRobbie). Against this backdrop, everyday negotiations of feminism and questioning patriarchal structures need a careful psycho-social analysis, systematically shedding light on the individual and the socio-cultural interpellations. In this chapter, we discuss the methodical conditions of such a psycho-social analysis by proposing the documentary method of interpretation (Bohnsack) as explicitly suitable for understanding the “self” and her social constitution, specifically the selves of young women as gendered in a two-sided way: on one hand, as a reflexively uttered presentation of one’s gendered self and, on the other hand, as a document of one’s gendered practice intertwined with societal conditions. We therefore aim to show how the presented approach helps methodically unfold the entanglement of explicitly uttered positions and habitual practical orientations by using the central methodological premise of the documentary method – a distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge and its functions for everyday practices. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->

Social and liberation movements all over the world have acted on the premise that oppression is kept alive, among other ways, through psychological mechanisms. Feminist and critical race epistemologies such as “feminist standpoint theories” and “epistemological ignorance” suggest that there might be different forms of not knowing involved depending on the social location of the (not) knowing subject. In this paper we suggest that the concrete psychological mechanisms involved in not knowing or outright ignorance differ according to one’s position in the social fabric of oppression and privilege. Drawing on various critical psychological and psychoanalytic reflections, as well as interpreting selected passages from a group discussion among elderly retirement home residents in Vienna, we illustrate how social position is translated into lack of knowledge about systems of oppression and privilege

Conceptualizations of ressentiment imply different assessments regarding the question whether the subject of ressentiment’s (SR) initial conflict is about constitutively socionormative concerns or whether moralizing anti-sentiments and self-glorifications ground in self-centred feelings of impotence and inferiority. Although the self-deceptive affective and cognitive dynamics of ressentiment development ultimately result in a distorted evaluative outlook, the SR’s repetitive obsession with socionormative matters should not be dismissed as an a posteriori coping mechanism. Rather, the SR’s inability to realize feelings of value points to a constitutively socionormative problematic involving a fundamental disruption of implicit value orientations (moral breakdown) as well as a structurally (re-)produced inability to engage in processes of communicative repair. It is concluded that ressentiment is a psychosocial phenomenon that can only be understood by looking simultaneously at its psycho-affective as well as sociodiscursive underpinnings.