A theory of life in the round

Abstract

This study addresses ways in which inmates at the only maximum-security prison for women in Neuse City (in the northeastern United States) redefine their social world in order to survive incarceration. An aim of the project is to engage in theory building in order to examine the experiences of a world that is “lived in the round.” A life in the round is a public form of life. It is a lifestyle with an enormous degree of imprecision. Yet, it is this inexactitude that provides an acceptable level of certainty. This way of life sets standards by which one constructs everyday meaning from reality. It is a “taken-for-granted,” “business-as-usual” style of being. Relying on ethnographic research and interviews with 80 women at the prison, the findings revealed that a life in the round was sustaining a “normative” existence.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 254 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.