scholarly journals Romancing science for global solutions: on narratives and interpretative schemas of science diplomacy

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Rungius ◽  
Tim Flink
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Global Solutions ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
Means And Ends ◽  
Global Challenges ◽  
Science Diplomacy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Positive Properties

Abstract In recent years, the concept of science diplomacy has gained remarkable ground in public policy. Calling for closer cooperation between actors from science and foreign policy, it is often being promulgated as a hitherto neglected catalyst for international understanding and global change. On what grounds science diplomacy entertains these high hopes, however, has remained unclear, and—as a blind spot—unaddressed in a discourse mostly shaped by policy practitioners. Recognizing that the discourse on science diplomacy is still unspecific about how its means and ends should fit together and be comprehended, we reconstruct the concept and its discourse as a materialization of actors’ interpretative schemas and shared assumptions about the social world they constantly need to make sense of. Science diplomacy is presented as a panacea against looming threats and grand challenges in a world facing deterioration. The prerequisite for such a solutionistic narrative is a simplified portrait of diplomacy in need of help from science that—romanticized in this discourse—bears but positive properties and exerts rationalizing, collaborative and even pacifying effects on a generic international community in its collective efforts to tackle global challenges. We conclude that these interpretative schemas that idealize and mythify science as overall collaborative, rationalizing and complexity-reducing are problematic. First, because the discourse misconceives ideals and norms for real and will therefore disappoint social expectations, and second, because science is likely to be instrumentalised for political purposes.

The People’s History and the Politics of Everyday Life since 1945

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Social World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Economic Uncertainty ◽  
Science Projects ◽  
The Social ◽  
Informal Politics

This chapter revisits interview transcripts from postwar social science projects to explore vernacular understandings of the social world, especially the informal politics of everyday life. Understanding shifting conceptions of historical time provides the key to understanding the crisis of social democracy in the 1970s and 1980s which was rooted less in the machinations of high politics than in popular responses to economic uncertainty and social change. What sealed the fate of the mobilizing myths of postwar social democracy was the collapse of popular belief in the idea of ‘the people’s’ forward march. By the 1980s expectations of intergenerational ‘progress’ had begun to loosen and conceptions of a shared future had broken down. But if popular conceptions of time and politics represent vernacular attempts to make sense of everyday experience, resetting the terms of economic life and public policy may re-establish shared conceptions of progress.

Concluding Remarks

2018 ◽  
pp. 240-254
Author(s):  
Todd Hedrick
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Social World ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Social Expectations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Role Based

These concluding reflections consider whether the paradigm of freedom through reconciliation articulated in the previous chapters is either too abstract or too accommodating to existing society to be considered genuinely emancipatory. It defends the book’s focus on law as a key site of reconciliation by highlighting the law’s role in identifying and transforming role-based social expectations. It also offers that while the type of object-relations psychoanalysis Honneth appeals to is not, by itself, sufficient to dismiss the concerns raised by “the culture industry,” it does suggest a mode of ego formation connected to a certain kind of ironical attitude toward the social world, through which inclusion in social systems structured by something like Habermas’ proceduralist paradigm of law could be experienced as emancipatory, despite that paradigm’s unfinished character.

The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

Our Most Troubling Madness

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Defeat ◽  
Social World ◽  
Epidemiological Evidence ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Brain Alteration ◽  
Benign Course ◽  
Cultural Features ◽  
The Way

This book examines the way schizophrenia is shaped by its social context: how life is lived with this madness in different settings, and what it is about those settings that alters the course of the illness, its outcome, and even the structure of its symptoms. Until recently, schizophrenia was perhaps our best example—our poster child—for the “bio-bio-bio” model of psychiatric illness: genetic cause, brain alteration, pharmacologic treatment. We now have direct epidemiological evidence that people are more likely to fall ill with schizophrenia in some social settings than in others, and more likely to recover in some social settings than in others. Something about the social world gets under the skin. This book presents twelve case studies written by psychiatric anthropologists that help to illustrate some of the variability in the social experience of schizophrenia and that illustrate the main hypotheses about the different experience of schizophrenia in the west and outside the west--and in particular, why schizophrenia seems to have a more benign course and outcome in India. We argue that above all it is the experience of “social defeat” that increases the risk and burden of schizophrenia, and that opportunities for social defeat are more abundant in the modern west. There is a new role for anthropology in the science of schizophrenia. Psychiatric science has learned—epidemiologically, empirically, quantitatively—that our social world makes a difference. But the highly structured, specific-variable analytic methods of standard psychiatric science cannot tell us what it is about culture that has that impact. The careful observation enabled by rich ethnography allows us to see in more detail what kinds of social and cultural features may make a difference to a life lived with schizophrenia. And if we understand culture’s impact more deeply, we believe that we may improve the way we reach out to help those who struggle with our most troubling madness.

Experience of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an English Benedictine Monastery

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Irvine
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peripheral Participation

What is the role of imitation in ethnographic fieldwork, and what are its limits? This article explores what it means to participate in a particular fieldsite; a Catholic English Benedictine monastery. A discussion of the importance of hospitality in the life of the monastery shows how the guest becomes a point of contact between the community and the wider society within which that community exists. The peripheral participation of the ethnographer as monastic guest is not about becoming incorporated, but about creating a space within which knowledge can be communicated. By focusing on the process of re-learning in the monastery – in particular, relearning how to experience silence and work – I discuss some of the ways in which the fieldwork experience helped me to reassess the social world to which I would return.

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