At first, I shunned the idea of studying with a group because I didn't think the experience would teach me anything that I didn't learn in class.
In fact, in 2007, when he and his team of transportation researchers began studying why travelers shunned buses, they found themselves in the midst of a turnaround.
Jewish scholarship and piety shunned the Christian scriptures: what could be gained by studying a self-proclaimed messiah and his mistaken followers?
Whereas Western biomedicine has traditionally shunned the study of personal experiences and emotions in relation to physical health, these scientists are placing state of mind at the centre of their work.
In the 1940s, suicide was, according to Farberow, "a long-neglected, taboo-encrusted social and personal phenomenon". Most doctors and psychologists shunned its study, but he saw in its underlying causes — loneliness, isolation, depression — a moral imperative to help.
"I would never put lunch before work," said Elaine, who has a free block for lunch in her schedule this spring, but shuns the cafeteria to study in the library, and snacks in class on yogurt, cut-up red peppers and Wheat Thins.
"I have been amazed by [Bainbridge's] ability to secure permission to study groups who shun attention," says Roger Finke, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University in State College.
The American family runs no ads and it taunts journalists with its studied secrecy and limelight-shunning fund managers.
He and his wife spent the years 1886-89 in Paris, where Hassam studied with prominent academic painters and fastidiously shunned anything that smacked of bohemia.
But as poisons are studied more closely by scientists they end up being embraced, not shunned.
But the crops are shunned in many countries and by many consumers, who say the health and environmental effects have not been adequately studied.
