Translation as a metaphoric traveller across disciplines

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia Zwischenberger

Abstract Translation, as a concept, may be regarded as a prototype of a ‘travelling concept’ as it has travelled to numerous disciplines in recent years. Therefore, a ‘translational turn’ was proclaimed for the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2007, 2009). Outside of translation studies, the use of the translation concept is not bound to “translation proper” (Jakobson 1959, 232) or to the way in which the concept is used and defined in translation studies. Consequently, ‘translation’ is usually used as a very broad metaphor in translation studies’ neighbouring disciplines and fields of research. This mobility shows the potential and high polysemantic value of the translation concept. What we are missing, however, is a ‘translaboration’ between translation studies and the various other disciplines that employ translation studies’ master concept. The paper will illustrate the background of the translational turn and the rise of the notion of ‘cultural translation’ as well as the deployment of the translation category in organisation studies and sociology. It will thus limit itself to examples from cultural studies and the social sciences. The paper’s aim is to revise and dispel some of the misconceptions held against translation proper and the discipline of translation studies, thereby showing that translation studies has the conceptual and theoretical grounding to be the leading discipline for the unfolding of a translational turn outside its disciplinary borders. Furthermore, the paper will show the common ground for a translaboration from which both translation studies and its neighbouring disciplines could ultimately benefit.

2020 ◽  

This anthology expands the perspectives of academic research on Europe. In the contributions it contains, which examine issues at the points where the humanities, cultural studies and the social sciences overlap, the diversity of critical and reflective analysis becomes clear, which in particular makes Europe’s cultural profile visible. They encourage discussion on the guiding principles of European integration, but above all on an image of Europe in which Europeanisation is understood as a process of permanent opening. Accordingly, Europeanisation is not simply the product of national conceptualisations, but focuses on the roots and elements of European common ground. This volume sets new standards in future research on Europe and puts them forward for discussion.


Horizons ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Casey

AbstractAs theologians are increasingly employing the social sciences in their work, it is incumbent upon them to examine the way the term religion is employed in these disciplines. This paper explains the common types of definition employed (the substantive and functional varieties) and critiques each from the perspective of contemporary theology. Both are found deficient in ways highly significant for theologians. This paper argues that it is inappropriate to attempt to establish any single definition of religion as normative. While the posture adopted appears to lay to rest any attempt to generate “grand theory” about religion it is not inconsistent with the canons of science as understood in current philosophy of science discourse.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Müller

In this article the author concentrates on the use of Indigenous Religion among the Akuapem in Ghana for the construction of their group identity. She discusses the way in which the Akuapem make use of the celebration of an annual indigenous religious festival (Odwira) to strengthen their group identity by self-identification, differentiation and the perception of other cultural groups. Her specific focus is on the common Asante-Akuapem history, the foundation of the Akan Golden Stools, akom dancing and the Odwira festival procession and Durbars. She concludes that Indigenous Religion should not be left out in the study of the construction of group identities in the social sciences.


Author(s):  
Mary L. Hirschfeld

There are two ways to answer the question, What can Catholic social thought learn from the social sciences about the common good? A more modern form of Catholic social thought, which primarily thinks of the common good in terms of the equitable distribution of goods like health, education, and opportunity, could benefit from the extensive literature in public policy, economics, and political science, which study the role of institutions and policies in generating desirable social outcomes. A second approach, rooted in pre-Machiavellian Catholic thought, would expand on this modern notion to include concerns about the way the culture shapes our understanding of what genuine human flourishing entails. On that account, the social sciences offer a valuable description of human life; but because they underestimate how human behavior is shaped by institutions, policies, and the discourse of social science itself, their insights need to be treated with caution.


Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
Barbara Adam

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.


Pólemos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Biet

AbstractTheatre and law are not so different. Generally, researchers work on the art of theatre, the rhetoric of the actors, or the dramaturgy built from law cases or from the questions that the law does not completely resolve. Trials, tragedies, even comedies are close: everybody can see the interpenetration of them on stage and in the courts. We know that, and we know that the dramas are made with/from/of law, we know that the art the actors are developing is not so far from the art of the lawyers, and conversely. In this paper, I would like to have a look at the action of the audience, at the session itself and at the way the spectators are here to evaluate and judge not only the dramatic action, not only the art of the actors, not only the text of the author, but also the other spectators, and themselves too. In particular, I will focus on the “common judgment” of the audience and on its judicial, aesthetic and social relationship. The spectators have been undisciplined, noisy, unruled, during such a long period that theatre still retains some prints of this behaviour, even if nowadays, the social and aesthetic rule is to be silent. But uncertainty, inattention, distraction, contradiction, heterogeneity are the notions which characterise the session, and the judgments of the spectators still depend on them. So, what was and what is the voice of the audience? And with what sort of voice do spectators give their judgments?


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachariah Basehore

For over a half-century, psychologists, educators, and researchers have criticized the common misusesof statistics in the social sciences. Here, I summarize some of the various objections to the blind use ofp-values and propose simple adjustments to 1) ameliorate the weaknesses inherent in current statisticalpractice, and 2) to paint a more complete picture of a study’s results.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHERINE E. SMITH ◽  
ELLEN STEWART

AbstractOf all the social sciences, social policy is one of the most obviously policy-orientated. One might, therefore, expect a research and funding agenda which prioritises and rewards policy relevance to garner an enthusiastic response among social policy scholars. Yet, the social policy response to the way in which major funders and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are now prioritising ‘impact’ has been remarkably muted. Elsewhere in the social sciences, ‘research impact’ is being widely debated and a wealth of concerns about the way in which this agenda is being pursued are being articulated. Here, we argue there is an urgent need for social policy academics to join this debate. First, we employ interviews with academics involved in health inequalities research, undertaken between 2004 and 2015, to explore perceptions, and experiences, of the ‘impact agenda’ (an analysis which is informed by a review of guidelines for assessing ‘impact’ and relevant academic literature). Next, we analyse high- and low-scoring REF2014 impact case studies to assess whether these concerns appear justified. We conclude by outlining how social policy expertise might usefully contribute to efforts to encourage, measure and reward research ‘impact’.


This final chapter explores yet further examples of how the principles of testing can be applied within the social sciences. As with the previous chapters, the authors begin by asking students to Google questions and then use the results Google provides to ask more sophisticated questions about the impact and personal consequences of the question. They begin by asking a question about how serial killer, Harold Shipman, was able to escape suspicion for as long as he did. They then take up a question about the common traits of serial killers, paying attention to the effects of the traits and how these traits may have personal connections to students. They conclude the chapter with a section about how we might make the decision to eat a third candy bar.


1978 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 110-139
Author(s):  
Ian White

From the time of its clearest origins with Pascal, the theory of probabilities seemed to offer means by which the study of human affairs might be reduced to the same kind of mathematical discipline that was already being achieved in the study of nature. Condorcet is to a great extent merely representative of the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were led on by the prospect of developing moral and political sciences on the pattern of the natural sciences, specifically physics. The development of economics and the social sciences, from the eighteenth century onwards, may be said in part to have fulfilled and in a manner to have perpetuated these ambitions. In so far as the new sciences have been susceptible of mathematical treatment, this has not been confined to the calculus of probabilities. But there is a temptation at every stage to ascribe fundamental significance and universal applicability to each latest mathematical device that is strikingly useful or illuminating on its first introduction. It is the theory of games that enjoys this position at present, and shapes the common contemporary conception of the very same problems that preoccupied Condorcet.


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