Materiality in Theory

2016 ◽  
pp. 521-538
Author(s):  
John Plotz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
Making Sense

The role that things, commodities, and ‘reification’ played in the writing of Marx and Dickens—as well as in the daily practice of nineteenth-century Britons—explains the Victorianist claim to intellectual priority when it comes to ‘thing theory’. Yet it is not easy to find helpful paradigms for explaining the distinctiveness of how Victorian thinkers make sense of the materiality of their habitus. Recent philosophical ‘object-centred’ approaches are generally unproductive when applied to the literary realm, while the anthropological bias towards rendering all study of objects the study of their social/communal function misses important, and distinctive, aesthetic features. Recent work by Isobel Armstrong, Leah Price, and others, however, suggests one approach: making sense of Victorian materiality and Victorian conceptions of materiality by considering Victorian books as the medium upon which representation occurs as well as a potential subject of such representation.

Making Sense of Mill

Dialogue ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Weinstock
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Philosophical Debates

Wendy Donner's The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy is an important and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of literature seeking to rescue Mill's practical philosophy from the rather lowly place it occupied in the estimation of many philosophers earlier this century, and to present him as a philosopher whose views form a coherent, systematic whole that can still contribute significantly to numerous moral and political debates. The book proposes an interpretation of the whole of Mill's practical philosophy, and attempts to reveal how aspects of Mill's thought, hitherto considered incompatible, actually mutually support one another. At the same time, Donner sets many of Mill's positions in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophical debates, and finds that on a number of important issues, his thought stands up rather well against more recent work.

Seeing Like the Fed: Culture, Cognition, and Framing in the Failure to Anticipate the Financial Crisis of 2008

2017 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 879-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Fligstein ◽  
Jonah Stuart Brundage ◽  
Michael Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Open Market ◽  
Financial Instruments ◽  
Federal Open Market Committee ◽  
Macroeconomic Theory ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Financial Crisis Of 2008 ◽  
Positive Light

One of the puzzles about the financial crisis of 2008 is why regulators, particularly the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), were so slow to recognize the impending collapse of the financial system and its broader consequences for the economy. We use theory from the literature on culture, cognition, and framing to explain this puzzle. Consistent with recent work on “positive asymmetry,” we show how the FOMC generally interpreted discomforting facts in a positive light, marginalizing and normalizing anomalous information. We argue that all frames limit what can be understood, but the content of frames matters for how facts are identified and explained. We provide evidence that the Federal Reserve’s primary frame for making sense of the economy was macroeconomic theory. The content of macroeconomics made it difficult for the FOMC to connect events into a narrative reflecting the links between foreclosures in the housing market, the financial instruments used to package the mortgages into securities, and the threats to the larger economy. We conclude with implications for the sociological literatures on framing and cognition and for decision-making in future crises.

scholarly journals Thing Theory

2017 ◽  
pp. 249-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally A. Applin ◽  
Michael D. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Social Awareness ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Smart Environment ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Location Aware ◽  
Resultant Data ◽  
The Internet Of Things

As healthcare professionals and others embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart environment paradigms, developers will bear the brunt of constructing the IT relationships within these, making sense of the big data produced as a result, and managing the relationships between people and technologies. This chapter explores how PolySocial Reality (PoSR), a framework for representing how people, devices and communication technologies interact, can be applied to developing use cases combining IoT and smart environment paradigms, giving special consideration to the nature of location-aware messaging from sensors and the resultant data collection in a healthcare environment. Based on this discussion, the authors suggest ways to enable more robust intra-sensor messaging through leveraging social awareness by software agents applied in carefully considered healthcare contexts.

Urban elites c. 1830–1930 and urban history

Urban History ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
Future Direction

The intention of this paper is to review the ways in which the role of urban elites has been examined and interpreted, and to show how the traditional concepts of social control and hegemony have required modification. The paper identifies two phases of study. The first phase was descriptive, concerned primarily with the identification and categorization of elites. The second phase, which began in the 1980s, was interactional and explored the influence of elites in inter-class relationships. The interactional role of elites is discussed in detail in relation to the exemplar of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester. The paper continues by considering the changes which elites began to undergo in the transitional conditions of the late nineteenth century. The significance of recent work is assessed and the paper concludes with some comments regarding the future direction of study on urban elites.

Ancient Malagasy Dynastic Succession; The Merina Example

1983 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 247-292
Author(s):  
Paul Ottino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pedagogical Model ◽  
Arthurian Romance ◽  
Dynastic Succession

My paper dealing with the Andriambahoaka universal sovereigns and the Indonesian heritage that they embodied brought out the eminently religious character of the Malagasy marvelous tales, disarticulated fragments from a Malay myth of origin. As Françoise Raison has noted, the religious value of Ibonia was still perfectly felt in Imerina during the first half of the nineteenth century. I do not hark back to the possibilities offered by the notion of Hikayat--or in Malagasy the Tantara--at once narration and imitation--“semblance,” as it was called in the Arthurian Romance of the Grail. These notions refer to these Shiʿite syntheses, sometimes with gnostic and dualist ideas borrowed from neo-platonism and the ancient Babylonian philosophies of Lights which, introduced into Madagascar by an Indonesian relay, conceived the descendants of Andriambahoaka in the image of that of the imāms descended from Muḥammad through his daughter Fāṭima and her husband ʿAlī--prototype of Ramini, ancestor of the ZafiRaminia and fourth Caliph, but more importantly the first imām, initiator, after the cycle of revelation that Muḥammad closed, of the cycle of explanation, of initiation, of the “return,”, that is, of walayāt.We are far from this “pedagogical model” that I evoked previously with regard to the other celestial line of the knights seeking the Grail. Far, too, from the unsatisfactory notions of ideology or the “imaginary” such as Georges Duby uses in his recent work, even though his chapter on “L'exemplarité celeste” returns to an infinitely richer universe, very near that which Henry Corbin describes. Can one truly explain from an agnostic point of view facts that are essentially perceived and experienced as religious? In any event going from Ibonia and the marvelous tales of the Andriambahoaka to the historical legends and genealogies in the first chapter of the Tantara ny Andriana of Callet, translated as Histoire des rois, we pass on to something entirely different.

THE FIRST EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
ISABEL RIVERS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The Poor

The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.

Tibetan Diaspora, Mobility and Place: ‘Exiles in Their Own Homeland’

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136
Author(s):  
Chris Vasantkumar
Keyword(s):  
Euclidean Space ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Theoretical Orientations ◽  
Tibetan Diaspora ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
Social Topology

This article elaborates a theoretical framework for making sense of Tibetans in Tibet who live as ‘exiles in their own homeland’. Placing questions of mobility at the centre of anthropological approaches to diaspora, it subjects ‘the fact of movement’ to critical scrutiny. In so doing it calls into question three fundamental assumptions of recent work in both ‘new mobilities’ and the study of diaspora more broadly: first, that people move and territory does not; second, that ‘place(s)’ and ‘movement(s)’ are different sorts of things, and clearly distinguishable; and, third, that movement takes places only in Euclidean space. Beginning by placing recent Tibetan experiences of exile and diaspora in comparative context, it then works through recent deconstructions of the boundary between movement and place, a critique of Western ethno-epistemologies of movement, and Law and Mol’s work on social topology as theoretical orientations that might allow us to make sense of mobile homelands and diasporas in situ.

Bunyan and the Historians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamsin Spargo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
English Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Analysis

This chapter offers a chronological account of varying historical and historicist approaches to the life and writings of John Bunyan from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The theoretical assumptions of major scholars in the field are highlighted, from a Whig such as Macaulay in the nineteenth century to a Marxist such as Christopher Hill in the twentieth, to more recent work by contemporary historians such as Richard L. Greaves and N. H. Keeble. It explores changing conceptions of the relationship between text and context, and past, present, and future, as they have informed research, analysis, historiography, and interpretation within the developing disciplines of History and of English Literature. This exploration is coupled with a consideration of the often unacknowledged relationship between teleological conceptions of history and the practice of historical research and historiography.

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