1. Natural bodies or social bodies?

2016 ◽  
pp. 7-23
Author(s):  
Chris Shilling
Keyword(s):  
Research Area ◽  
The Body ◽  
Biological Entity ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Body Studies ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Historical Developments

Social factors are important for the constitution and development of our embodied being. Yet some still consider the human body to be an exclusively biological entity. ‘Natural bodies or social bodies?’ describes the emergence, from the social sciences and humanities, of the broad interdisciplinary research area of ‘body studies’. This academic field addresses a wide variety of social and cultural issues as relevant to the inescapably bodily character of human existence. It has become a viable subject due to various social and historical developments—feminist and environmental campaigns, medical and technological developments, and the rise of consumer culture—that raised the visibility of the body as a general academic issue.

scholarly journals Bringing the doctoral thesis by published papers to the Social Sciences and the Humanities: a quantitative easing?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Rigby ◽  
Barbara Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
Doctoral Degree ◽  
Education Sector ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk

This paper reflects on alternatives to the traditional form of doctoral thesis which are emerging to reflect a new approach to the valuation and designation of scientific outputs. We examine the changes and consider some implications. We suggest that the adoption of co-citation as underpinning principle for the measurement of knowledge structures has led to re-designation of the value of knowledge and knowledge producers in increasingly quantitative terms. We use notions of ‘institution’ and ‘logic’ to better understand such a change and its implications. Under a new logic that is gradually embedding itself across the higher education sector, the ‘constitutive rules’ concerned with the value of research now prioritize quantification, and tangibility of output, and quality is increasingly equated with citation. Whilst the scientific disciplines have traditionally been closer to this model, albeit with significant national variations, subjects within the Social Sciences and Humanities are now being affected. We present evidence from a small study of the UK higher education sector of university regulation of doctoral degree submission format in two disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences (History and Sociology). Our evidence shows the recent and gradual adoption of a practice, previously more common in scientific disciplines, that allows the doctoral thesis to be constituted by a series of publishable papers, known by a variety of names, the most common being ‘Thesis by Published Papers’, ‘Journal Format Thesis’, ‘Alternative Format Thesis’, and ‘Integrated Thesis’. As the thesis of the Social Sciences and Humanities – itself an important institution in the academic field - begins to reflect a greater emphasis upon quantity of knowledge outputs, a tension emerges with the most central of all scientific institutions, the peer-reviewed journal paper.

Understanding Researchers Collaboration in eParticipation using Social Network Analysis

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-68
Author(s):  
Eleni Kaliva ◽  
Dimitrios Katsioulas ◽  
Efthimios Tambouris ◽  
Konstantinos Tarabanis
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Social Network Analysis ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Core Network ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Political Priority ◽  
Scientific Collaborations

Over the past years electronic participation (eParticipation) became a political priority worldwide. Consequently, research on the field has dramatically grown. However, eParticipation is still an unconsolidated research area that lacks generally agreed upon definitions, research disciplines, methods and boundaries. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the establishment of the eParticipation identity by investigating the scientific collaborations in the domain. The study of the nature of academic collaboration reveals the structure and the intellectual roots of the research community and the most influential authors. The approach followed in this paper includes the construction of the co-authorship network and the calculation of the social network analysis (SNA) metrics that describe the nature of the collaboration. The results revealed that eParticipation is a rather active academic field in the last decade including a high degree of collaboration and a core network of very influential researchers.

scholarly journals The Uses and Disuses of Doctoral Degrees in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: The Case of Hungary

Triple Helix ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Annamária Inzelt ◽  
László Csonka
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Doctoral Degrees ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Phd Education ◽  
Education Process

This study offers a contribution to our existing knowledge of the impacts of Hungarian social science and humanities PhDs on the graduates themselves and on their own personal and social environments. We employ new empirical findings—gained from an e-survey and from structured interviews—in an attempt to understand and explain impacts and lacks. Empirical analysis allowed us to identify certain differences in terms of usefulness in several respects, such as the specific sector of employment, mobility or the actual level of impact. The PhD education process and the degree itself have a more positive impact on personal satisfaction and on an individual’s career than on the employing organisation. A PhD degree in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) fields seems to generate more in the way of benefit and impact in the academic field than in non-academic jobs—a difference which reflects on the academic orientation of Hungarian PhD education. All stakeholders need to devote further major efforts into developing the “dual” form of PhD education, so clearly benefitting the whole of the Hungarian economy and society.

Contextualizing Music and the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. xiv-18
Author(s):  
Youn Kim ◽  
Sander L. Gilman
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Broad Context ◽  
General Context ◽  
Biomedical Sciences ◽  
Body Studies ◽  
Embodied Mind ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Sexual Body

The presence of the phenomenological body is central to music in all of its varieties and contradictions. With the explosion of scholarly works on the body in virtually every field in the humanities, the social as well as the biomedical sciences, the question of how such a complex understanding of the body is related to music, which has its own complexity, has been investigated within specific disciplinary perspectives. The present handbook brings together these particular aspects of such relationships in a broad context and provides a platform for the discussion of the multidimensional interfaces of music and the body. This introduction first discusses the multiple definitions of the body and raises a set of fundamental questions in the general context of body studies. Thereafter, it contextualizes the topic within the discourse of musicology and identifies six different yet related aspects of music and the body, namely, the moving and performing body, the brain and psyche, embodied mind and embodied rhythm, the disabled and sexual body, music as medicine, and the multimodal body.

scholarly journals Practical epistemology: the role of peer review in organizing scientific research

2014 ◽  
pp. 198-207
Author(s):  
A. V. Shestopal ◽  
V. I. Konnov
Keyword(s):  
Peer Review ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Expert Assessment ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Science Funding ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Epistemology

The article considers peer review as the main procedure for demarcating scientific knowledge from other kinds thereof, which do not meet the criteria set for research results. The authors examine the history of peer review, which has first been used in early scientific journals and then has become one of the key approaches to distributing funds for research in science foundations, such as the U.S. National Science Foundation. The article also considers the role of peer review in the legal process, wherein observance of this procedure can be seen as the main criteria, which separates scientific evidence from mere testimony. The description of the main elements of the peer review procedure is based on the "Statement of principles for scientific merit review" the summary of the results of the Global Summit on Merit Review, which brought together heads of science funding organizations from more than 50 countries. The Statement listed the following principles: expert assessment, transparency, impartiality, appropriateness, confidentiality, integrity and ethical considerations. Although these principles are seen as a way to guarantee efficient peer review one has to consider the peculiarities of a particular research area, first of all the differences between social and natural sciences. Accordingly the article gives an overview of key traits of peer review in the social sciences and humanities. The authors also consider the main procedural elements - preparation of individual reviews, consideration by panels, anonymity of reviewers. Finally the article addresses the problems of peer review such as non-transparent process, elitism in selecting reviewers, conservativeness of decisions, and possible ways of handling these problems.

scholarly journals The deviant body in neo-Victorian literature: a somatechnical reading of the freak in Rosie Garland’s "The palace of curiosities" (2013)

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 183
Author(s):  
Lin Elinor Pettersson
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Biological Entity ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Freak Show ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
External Forces ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Mind

The contemporary fascination with historical, social and literary representations of the deviant body calls for new understandings of corporeality that question the body as a purely biological entity, and invites readings of corporeality as culturally inflected. The present article explores neo-Victorian enfreakment through the lens of “somatechnics” reading “[e]mbodiment as the incarnation or materialisation of historically and culturally specific discourses and practises” (Sullivan and Murray 2014: 3). I will apply the concept of somatechnics to (neo-)Victorian enfreakment practises drawing on scholars as Bordo (1993), Grosz (1994), Sullivan and Murray (2014) who, among others, have challenged the binary split between the mind and body, and argued for the social construction of embodied subjectivities. Although the body’s physical materiality is irreducible, the body is always invested, shaped and transformed by external forces, or “technologies of power” as denominated by Foucault (2003a). I seek to address the human exhibit in Rosie Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities (2013) to examine neo-Victorian reinventions of the divergent body. With this objective in mind, I will analyse how the neo-Victorian mode interlocks the Victorian freak-show discourse with the reader perspective to bring subjective responses to corporeality, humanity and normativity to the forefront, and in doing so, turns an exploitative space as the freak show into a site of self-reliance, self-expression and even fulfilment.

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

A body without a head

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Chavoshian ◽  
Sophia Park
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Passive Condition ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Logical Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Body Shapes ◽  
Body Theory

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.

Myriad Aspects of Secular Thinking on Malayali Cuisine

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Healthy Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civilized Society

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]

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