scholarly journals Social constructionism and climate science denial

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Ove Hansson
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Actual State ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Strong Programme

Abstract It has been much debated whether epistemic relativism in academia, for instance in the form of social constructivism, the strong programme, deconstructionism, and postmodernism, has paved the way for the recent upsurge in science denial, in particular climate science denial. In order to provide an empirical basis for this discussion, an extensive search of the social science literature was performed. It showed that in the 1990s, climate science was a popular target among academic epistemic relativists. In particular, many STS scholars used it as an allegedly clear example of claims by natural scientists that should be treated as mere social constructions, rather than as reports on the actual state of the natural world. A few connections between social constructivists and corporate science denialism were also uncovered, but the extent of such connections could not be determined. With few exceptions, the stream of criticism of climate science from academic relativists has dwindled since the 1990s. One reason for this seems to be that the contrarian position lost its attraction when it became associated with corporate and right-wing propagandists.

scholarly journals MEMAKNAI KERAGAMAN: The Others dalam Konstruksi Sosial Para Elit Kelompok-kelompok Keagamaan di Kota Mataram

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 365
Author(s):  
Fawaizul Umam
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Constructionism ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Cultural Brokers ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Major Subject ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ideal Solutions

<p class="Iabstrak"><em>Based on the urgency of the involvement of the groups’ views on the others in any peace initiation, this study attempted (1) to investigate how the leaders of religious groups in Mataram socially constructed the others and (2) to determine the typology of their social constructions by relying on three main paradigms of religiosity (exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism). The leaders of religious groups were chosen as a major subject because they had contributed significantly to the social dynamics of the Muslims in this city; as religious elites (ulama), they were not only cultural brokers, but also active creators of social change. To analyze their social constructions on the others, this research used the Berger’s social constructionism theory. Their social constructions excavated from purposively selected informants, namely the formal or informal elites of religious groups like the Ahmadiyya, Salafists, Tablighi Jamaat, Shiite, and the traditionalist (Nahdlatul Wathan) and modernist (Muhammadiyah) Islamic groups. It was concluded that their social constructions actually emerged through three moments of dialectic which formed the subjective and objective realities on the others. Through those social constructions, they defined the others. All of their social constructions typologically tended to be exclusive, in certain limits also inclusive, and pluralistic tendencies tended to be absent.<strong> </strong>Based on the typefication, this study proposed a number of ideal solutions for creating the coexistence of Islamic religious groups in Mataram..</em></p>Bertolak dari urgensi pelibatan pandangan masing-masing kelompok tentang <em>the others</em> dalam setiap inisiasi perdamaian, studi ini mengkaji (1) konstruksi sosial para elit kelompok-kelompok keagamaan di Kota Mataram tentang <em>the others</em> sekaligus menentukan (2) tipologinya berdasar tiga model utama keberagamaan, yakni eksklusivisme, inklusivisme, dan pluralisme. Para elit dipilih sebagai subjek karena mereka berperan signifikan dalam kelompok masing-masing. Dalam dinamika sosial masyarakat Muslim Kota Mataram, mereka kurang-lebih adalah ulama yang berperan sebagai “makelar budaya” sekaligus kreator aktif perubahan sosial. Untuk memahami konstruksi sosial para elit tentang <em>the others</em>, studi ini menerapkan teori konstruksi sosial Berger. Data utama digali dari para informan yang dipilih secara purposif, yakni mereka yang secara formal maupun informal memimpin kelompok-kelompok keagamaan Islam seperti Ahmadiyah, Salafi, Jama’ah Tabligh, Syi’ah, dan juga kelompok tradisionalis (Nahdlatul Wathan) dan modernis (Muhammadiyah). Hasil kajian menunjukkan bahwa konstruksi sosial mereka muncul lewat tiga momen dialektik yang membentuk realitas subjektif sekaligus objektif tentang <em>the</em> <em>others</em>. Hal itu menentukan cara mereka selaku elit kelompok dalam memaknai dan menyikapi <em>the</em> <em>others</em>. Tipefikasinya menunjukkan, penyikapan mereka tentang <em>the others</em> cenderung eksklusif, dalam batas-batas tertentu inklusif, sementara tendensi pluralistik cenderung absen. Berdasar itu solusi berupa format ideal pengelolaan keragaman bagi penciptaan koeksistensi antarkelompok keagamaan di Kota Mataram diajukan.

scholarly journals Critical Analysis of Social Constructivism: Myth or Reality for Peace and Security

2020 ◽  
Vol V (I) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Nazim Rahim ◽  
Asghar Ali
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
International System ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Intrinsic Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Universal Truth

Subjectivity is the mother of all social sciences. There is no universal truth, there is no objective reality and there is no finality in social sciences. Final truth belongs to heaven, not to this world and none of the theories can claim finality or objectivity. Nonetheless, theories try to explain the truth, holding water, either more or less. Theories, highlighting the intrinsic nature of humans [good & bad], the structure of international system (anarchic)or class struggle[bourgeois & proletariat]are both researchable and discernible. Social Constructivism, on the other hand labels all the theories as social constructions and itself constructs an endless desert of ideas, develops absurdity, and makes the truth less accessible and more mythical. Social Constructivism, instead of explaining the truth is making it blurred and doubtful. Instead of ensuring clarity, its own assumptions are constructing a mythical world. This analytical paper critically analyzes the social constructivists' assumptions and their critique on all the established beliefs in general and mainstream perspectives in particular.

scholarly journals Green Critique in a Red Environment: East European Art and Ecology Under Socialism

ARTMargins ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 60-83
Author(s):  
Maja Fowkes ◽  
Reuben Fowkes
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Actual State ◽  
Environmental Pressures ◽  
East European ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nature Awareness ◽  
East European Art ◽  
Cover Up

For the wave of ecological consciousness that spread on the counter-cultural currents of the 1968 uprisings across the globe, the Iron Curtain proved to be as porous as it was in the case of contemporary art's turn towards conceptualism. This article examines East European artists’ approaches to the natural environment and their engagement with green thought against the political, social and environmental background of real existing socialism, in which the party not only attempted to cover up the actual state of environment pollution but also to keep control over access to ecological discourse. Through the dematerialised practices of Slovenian OHO Group, Croatian group TOK, Slovak artist Rudolf Sikora and Czech Petr Štembera, it considers their critical stance towards the communist system's promethean take on nature, awareness of the social and existential aspects of environmental crisis in urban centres, investigation of cosmological dimensions as a strategy to distance themselves from the ideological contamination of the socialist public sphere, interest in phenomenological, non-hierarchical encounters with the natural world, as well as new-age experiments in communal living on the margins of socialist society. By asking how far their understanding of ecological issues was coloured by the socialist system itself and the extent to which their green critique offered an antidote to its limitations, this article proposes that the coalescence of ecology and conceptual art in the wake of 1968 could also be considered a tipping point in the slow-burning crisis of socialism, pointing the way to its subsequent implosion under the strain of social, political and environmental pressures.

7. Social Constructivism and European Integration

2018 ◽  
pp. 128-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Risse
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Meaning Construction ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agency And Structure

The chapter presents a short overview on social constructivism as a distinct research programme and shows what it contributes to the study of European integration. Social constructivism represents a meta-theory or an ontology, not one more substantive theory of European integration. The substantive contribution of social constructivism to the various theories of European integration is to insist on taking meaning construction, discourse, and language seriously, and to point out the mutual constitution of agency and structure. Moreover, social constructivism emphasizes the constitutive features of social institutions including the EU as not just constraining behaviour, but also affecting the identities, interests, and preferences of actors. The chapter then uses the question of European identity to illustrate empirically social constructivism ‘at work’. A constructivist account of the euro and the migration crises demonstrates that European political leaders reacted largely to the mobilization of exclusive-nationalist identities by (mostly) right-wing populist parties and movements. In sum, the social constructivist research programme in EU studies has quickly left the stage of meta-theorizing and concern for ontology and epistemology behind, and has now entered the realm of concrete empirical work dealing with real puzzles of European political life.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich
Keyword(s):  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover

Race and the Epigenetics of Memory

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Dna Analysis ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Neural Function ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
Race Science ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Dead Bodies ◽  
Lasting Change

In my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions. 

Main Forms of Propagandistic Activities of the Right-Wing Parties (1904–1914)

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 656-676
Author(s):  
Igor V. Omeliyanchuk
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Right ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article examines the main forms and methods of agitation and propagandistic activities of monarchic parties in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century. Among them the author singles out such ones as periodical press, publication of books, brochures and flyers, organization of manifestations, religious processions, public prayers and funeral services, sending deputations to the monarch, organization of public lectures and readings for the people, as well as various philanthropic events. Using various forms of propagandistic activities the monarchists aspired to embrace all social groups and classes of the population in order to organize all-class and all-estate political movement in support of the autocracy. While they gained certain success in promoting their ideology, the Rights, nevertheless, lost to their adversaries from the radical opposition camp, as the monarchists constrained by their conservative ideology, could not promise immediate social and political changes to the population, and that fact was excessively used by their opponents. Moreover, the ideological paradigm of the Right camp expressed in the “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” formula no longer agreed with the social and economic realities of Russia due to modernization processes that were underway in the country from the middle of the 19th century.

Scientific Collaboration and Collective Knowledge

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Particle Physics ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Collaborative Work ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Collective Knowledge ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Social Structure Of Science ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Social

Descartes once argued that, with sufficient effort and skill, a single scientist could uncover fundamental truths about our world. Contemporary science proves the limits of this claim. From synthesizing the human genome to predicting the effects of climate change, some current scientific research requires the collaboration of hundreds (if not thousands) of scientists with various specializations. Additionally, the majority of published scientific research is now coauthored, including more than 80% of articles in the natural sciences. Small collaborative teams have become the norm in science. This is the first volume to address critical philosophical questions about how collective scientific research could be organized differently and how it should be organized. For example, should scientists be required to share knowledge with competing research teams? How can universities and grant-giving institutions promote successful collaborations? When hundreds of researchers contribute to a discovery, how should credit be assigned—and can minorities expect a fair share? When collaborative work contains significant errors or fraudulent data, who deserves blame? In this collection of essays, leading philosophers of science address these critical questions, among others. Their work extends current philosophical research on the social structure of science and contributes to the growing, interdisciplinary field of social epistemology. The volume’s strength lies in the diversity of its authors’ methodologies. Employing detailed case studies of scientific practice, mathematical models of scientific communities, and rigorous conceptual analysis, contributors to this volume study scientific groups of all kinds, including small labs, peer-review boards, and large international collaborations like those in climate science and particle physics.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

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