4. Historical Materialism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Herring
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Peace Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sectoral Approach ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines historical materialism and its approach to understanding what constitutes security. It begins with an overview of of the social scientific, philosophical, and political dimensions of historical materialism and what it involves, including its diversity, value, and potential but avoidable pitfalls. It then describes key concepts of historical materialism and uses them to show how capitalism generally and in its recent neoliberal form aim to generate insecurity for labour and security for capital. It also discusses the relationships between historical materialism and approaches to security in a wider context (realism, liberalism, social constructivism, and gender) and to various perspectives on security (securitization and the sectoral approach, peace studies, Critical Security Studies, and human security). The chapter concludes with an overall assessment of the contribution of historical materialism to the scholarship and politics of security and insecurity.

4. Historical Materialism

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-60
Author(s):  
Eric Herring
Keyword(s):  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Peace Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sectoral Approach ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
And Gender

This chapter examines historical materialism and its approach to understanding what constitutes security. It begins with an overview of of the social scientific, philosophical, and political dimensions of historical materialism and what it involves, including its diversity, value, and potential but avoidable pitfalls. It then describes key concepts of historical materialism and uses them to show how capitalism generally and in its recent neoliberal form aim to generate insecurity for labour and security for capital. It also discusses the relationships between historical materialism and approaches to security in a wider context (realism, liberalism, social constructivism, and gender) and to various perspectives on security (securitization and the sectoral approach, peace studies, Critical Security Studies, and human security). The chapter concludes with an overall assessment of the contribution of historical materialism to the scholarship and politics of security and insecurity.

Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism and the Social Science of Marxian Economics

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Westra
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Critical Realism ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Jel Classification ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Marxian Economics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific

This article supports claims that critical realism philosophy of science, as refounded in the hands of Roy Bhaskar, offers valuable knowledge enhancing insight into the advancement of Marx’s research program. However, it maintains that key principles set out by Bhaskar have not been adequately assimilated by those working with critical realism in the field of Marxist studies. When they are properly considered, they point to the necessity of reconstructing Marx’s corpus on a divergent basis from the conventional form it has assumed since the codification of “Marxism” by Karl Kautsky in the late nineteenth century as an overarching theory of history or historical materialism, wherein Marx’s economic studies in Capital are portrayed as but a subtheory. The article summarily breaks down three cardinal scientific principles elaborated by Bhaskar, which carry the most vital implications for Marxism. These are the bringing of ontology “back in” to theory construction, the robust case made for social science as a capital-S science, and the specification of retroduction as strategy for scientific discovery. It then explores the principles with regard to three abiding and interrelated questions of the Marxist research program: first is the very condition of intelligibility of economic theory; second is the question of the raison d’être for the dialectical architecture of Capital; third is the social scientific implications of the cognitive sequence in Marxism. In this endeavor the article introduces work in the Uno-Sekine tradition of Japanese Marxism. It shows how Uno’s reconstruction of Marxism is closely supported by Bhaskar’s fundamental criteria for science in a way that serves to strengthen Marx’s own scientific claims for his work.JEL Classification: B51, B400

Simulating Machines: Modelling, Metaphysics and the Mechanosphere

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-374
Author(s):  
F. LeRon Shults
Keyword(s):  
Computer Modelling ◽  
Computational Modelling ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Major Section

This article explores some of the ways in which the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus, and especially its machinic metaphysics, can be connected to recent developments in computer modelling and social simulation, which provide new tools for thinking that are becoming increasingly popular among philosophers and social scientists. Conversely, the successful deployment of these tools provides warrant for the flat ontology articulated in A Thousand Plateaus and therefore contributes to the ‘reversal of Platonism’ for which Deleuze had called in his earlier works, such as Logic of Sense. The first major section offers a brief exposition of some key concepts in A Thousand Plateaus in order to set the stage for the second and third major sections, which argue that the fabrication of a metaphysics of immanence can be accelerated by connecting its conceptual apparatus more explicitly to insights derived from philosophical analyses of computational modelling and simulation and the social scientific use of ‘assemblage theory’. The article concludes with a summary of the argument and a brief consideration of some of the potential ethical and political implications of this interdisciplinary engagement.

Geography and Class

Geography ◽  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raju J. Das
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Social Oppression ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
A Site

The concept of class has been alive in the social sciences and humanities for well over a century. In geography, class was popularized in the late 1970s as Marxism was brought into the field by the likes of David Harvey and Richard Peet, and with the establishment of the journal Antipode at Clark University in Massachusetts. Geographers have approached class from the vantage point of key concepts of geographical inquiry—namely space, place, scale, and the environment. In recent decades, alongside the postmodern turn in the social sciences and humanities, research and thinking about class has been challenged by feminism and antiracist thinking, which have questioned the centrality of class in explanatory critique. It is argued that the class-centric approach to society ignores, or heavily underemphasizes, the gendered and racial dimensions of society. Given the race- and gender-based fragmentation of the working class, the class approach could not present a unified force against capitalism, so there was a need for new conceptualizations that went beyond class. Later works in this strain of thought argued that class position only matters as a site of experience and does not necessarily provide any potential for resistance. As such, the power of class as a concept has become increasingly diluted in the field, with a seeming resurgence that plateaus with the triad of oppression (race, gender, class) and the so-called method of intersectionality. More recently, debates surrounding class as a category have resurfaced in geography in relation to studies on the agency of labor, but this work has been found wanting for its voluntarism and empiricism. There is only a minority voice in geography and allied disciplines that argues for the primacy or centrality of class as it is rooted in the relation of production, and that has implications for understanding nonclass social oppression and anti-capitalist resistance.

scholarly journals Religion in the Global East: Challenges and Opportunities for the Social Scientific Study of Religion

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fenggang Yang
Keyword(s):  
East Asian ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Social Scientific Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Asian Society ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
East Asian Society

This essay is based on the Presidential Address at the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Inaugural Conference on 3–5 July 2018 in Singapore. It discusses some aspects of the key concepts, some of the distinct characteristics of religion in East Asia, and some implications for the social scientific study of religion in general.

9. European Integration and Gender

2018 ◽  
pp. 174-194
Author(s):  
Yvonne Galligan
Keyword(s):  
European Integration ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
Gender Mainstreaming ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Liberal Intergovernmentalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

This chapter analyses theories of European integration through a gender lens. It points to the diversity of perspectives in gender scholarship on European integration, and draws on these different points of view to examine other theoretical approaches. It assumes that gender is a basic organising principle of the social world, and therefore is an integral aspect of European integration. The chapter discusses gender theory and its contribution to the study of European integration. It then goes on to interrogate other European integration theories - liberal intergovernmentalism, neofunctionalism, and social constructivism – examining the nature of gendered power that they emphasize and evaluating the extent to which they are open to incorporating a gender-informed perspective. The chapter then analyses the integrationist effect of the European economic crisis on gender equality. This discussion reveals the marginalization of gender equality, and gender mainstreaming, as the neo-liberal response to the economic crisis created new gender inequalities and perpetuated old patterns of gender hierarchy.

scholarly journals Gender in Early U.S. Social Policy

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Shola Orloff
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Indirect Effect ◽  
The State ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
Bargaining Position ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Wage Earning

In the social-scientific literature on the welfare state, scholars have long argued that the quality and extent of support available to workers outside the market—the citizen's wage—has a direct impact on their standard of living and an indirect effect on the bargaining position of labor within market relationships. In a parallel way, recent feminist scholarship on social policy has pointed out that how—if at all—the state steps in to assist women in their role as mothers when marital relationships break up or never form has a direct impact on the standard of living within motheronly families, and an indirect effect on women's bargaining position within two-parent families by (at least partially) setting the terms on which they will live should they want to exit relationships. Thus, just as analysts have argued that the level of the citizen's wage is revealing about the effect of policy on class inequality, a focus on what the state does for single mothers and their children is analytically strategic for assessing the relationship between policy and gender inequality. The situation of mother-only families reveals the inherent social and economic vulnerability of all women that exists due to their childrearing and domestic responsibilities and their low earnings, which is usually masked when women are in households with wage-earning men.

PAR Method

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Billies
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Design Method ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Context Analysis ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender

The work of the Welfare Warriors Research Collaborative (WWRC), a participatory action research (PAR) project that looks at how low income lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming (LG-BTGNC) people survive and resist violence and discrimination in New York City, raises the question of what it means to make conscientization, or critical consciousness, a core feature of PAR. Guishard's (2009) reconceptualization of conscientization as “moments of consciousness” provides a new way of looking at what seemed to be missing from WWRC's process and analysis. According to Guishard, rather than a singular awakening, critical consciousness emerges continually through interactions with others and the social context. Analysis of the WWRC's process demonstrates that PAR researchers doing “PAR deep” (Fine, 2008)—research in which community members share in all aspects of design, method, analysis and product development—should have an agenda for developing critical consciousness, just as they would have agendas for participation, for action, and for research.

Narrating Society: Enacting ‘Immigrant’ Characters through Negotiating, Naturalization, and Forgetting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanne Boersma
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Work ◽  
Immigrant Integration ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Media And Communication

This article scrutinizes how ‘immigrant’ characters of perpetual arrival are enacted in the social scientific work of immigrant integration monitoring. Immigrant integration research produces narratives in which characters—classified in highly specific, contingent ways as ‘immigrants’—are portrayed as arriving and never as having arrived. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork at social scientific institutions and networks in four Western European countries, this article analyzes three practices that enact the characters of arrival narratives: negotiating, naturalizing, and forgetting. First, it shows how negotiating constitutes objects of research while at the same time a process of hybridization is observed among negotiating scientific and governmental actors. Second, a naturalization process is analyzed in which slippery categories become fixed and self-evident. Third, the practice of forgetting involves the fading away of contingent and historical circumstances of the research and specifically a dispensation of ‘native’ or ‘autochthonous’ populations. Consequently, the article states how some people are considered rightful occupants of ‘society’ and others are enacted to travel an infinite road toward an occupied societal space. Moreover, it shows how enactments of arriving ‘immigrant’ characters have performative effects in racially differentiating national populations and hence in narrating society. This article is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.

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