Practice Theories: The Latest Turn in Historiography?

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Polyakov
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Development ◽  
Social Realm ◽  
Turn Over

Abstract The linguistic turn in historiography has given way to a ‘cultural’ or ‘practical’ turn over the course of the last several decades. For its proponents, this new development heralds a return of the intentional subject and a re-invigorated concern with the dynamic nature of the social realm. Approaches clustered around the concept of practice, emphasizing routines of daily activities as the backbone of social organization and its stability, specifically seek to resolve the persisting conceptual tension in social sciences between structure and agency. This article surveys the seminal work on the topic of practice, and considers how the approach can be recruited for purposes of historiographic analysis. In defending a tentatively optimistic assessment of practice theory’s usefulness for this purpose, the article also evaluates some of the weaknesses that this approach has yet to cogently address.

scholarly journals The (mis)uses of life histories. The linguistic turn, life histories and (women’s) life stories

1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. 133-151
Author(s):  
Claudia de Lima Costa
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Social ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Women's Lives

This paper retraces the debates on life-histories before and after the linguistic turn in the social sciences, and, more specifically, in the anthropological tradition. It stresses how poststructuralist feminist methodological, theoretical, and political appropriations of personal narratives represent a significant textual intervention in the gendered social-cultural scripts of women’s lives.

scholarly journals Classroom assemblage: the vibrant setting of the schooling process

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 580
Author(s):  
Paula Cristina Lameu
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Classroom Environment ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Multiple Case ◽  
Social Realm ◽  
Schooling Process ◽  
Matter Energy

Some scholars and researchers have been claiming we are in a New Materialist and Posthumanist era. It means that for the ones who are researching in Social Sciences, the focus is not only the human as the centre and the cause of what happens in the social realm. For human, nonhuman and inhuman are attributed the same importance in research once all of them are components of reality, inserted in nature.Reality is regarded as complex, not simple straightforward isolated cause and effect processes. This is how the classroom is supposed to be observed in educational research: not only teaching and learning, but these two processes and policy making, and identity construction, and emotional flows, and curriculum, and schooling, and…, and…The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the complexity of the classroom environment regarded as an assemblage. The hypothesis is that all the components of the assemblage are equally vital, although some components are more vibratory than others. The theory of Vitalism from Driesch (1914) and the Vital Materialism from Bennett (2010a, 2010b) are used as the theoretical tools for analysis. Assemblage Ethnography (YOUDELL, 2015; YOUDELL and MCGIMPSEY, 2015) is the methodology of data collection. A multiple case study was developed in three different schools in United Kingdom: one Primary, one Secondary and one Post-secondary. The results suggest that teacher and students are the components who most influence on the classroom assemblage composition, decomposition and recomposition orienting the flows of matter-energy once they are change-creating agents.

Compensatory Justice and Social Institutions

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph H. Carens
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Ought Implies Can ◽  
The Social ◽  
Compensatory Justice ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Moral Philosophers

Moral philosophers are fond of the dictum “ought implies can” and even deontologists normally admit the need to take account of consequences in the design of social institutions. Too often, however, philosophers fail to take advantage of the knowledge provided by the social sciences about the constraints and consequences of alternative forms of social organization. By discussing ideals in abstraction from the problems of institutionalization, they fail at least to see some of the important consequences and costs of a proposed ideal, and sometimes they fail even to understand the ideal itself.

Arviq! The Northern Hunter’s Spiritual Connection to Animals and Community Presenter:

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chelsea Drent
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Daily Activities ◽  
Social Constructions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Domination ◽  
Critical Social Science ◽  
Inuit Peoples ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

In Inuktituk, nuna means the land. It means the rocks, rivers, mountains and the forests. Nuna is everything, and all parts of the nuna have an inua, which means a living soul. There is a special, if not sacred relationship between members of northern communities and the nuna. However, these sacred relationships are all too often glossed over, if not forgotten. In the social sciences, author John Sorenson articulates a critical argument and evocative opinions about hunting in his article; Hunting is a Part of Human Nature (John Sorenson, “Hunting is a Part of Human Nature,” Culture of Prejudice, Arguments in Critical Social Science. Eds. Judith Blackwell, Murray Smith, John Sorenson, (Canada: Broadview Press, 2003).Sorenson demonstrates that hunting is an unnatural human activity which is linked to a cultural domination over animals. However, in these statements Sorenson neglects to consider the northern hunter in Inuit communities around the world. Cultural myths, social constructions and daily activities prove that hunting animals is a core value to how many Inuit peoples relate to each other and perceive themselves in the cosmos. This is a study that examines the relationship of people, land, animals and faith in order to understand the significance of hunting within Inuit cultures.

What is Social Science History, Anyway?

1999 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-480
Author(s):  
Paula Baker
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Science History ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Science History ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Methodologies

This group of essays came out of an attempt to address the “usually unasked,” “bound to embarrass” question that Eric Monkkonen raised in his 1994 presidential address to the Social Science History Association. As both the social sciences and history have been reshaped in recent years by intellectual tendencies variously labeled “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,” or the “linguistic turn,” the never especially clear relationship between the social sciences and history has grown even more muddy. The essays that follow are drawn from two sessions of the 1998 annual program of the Social Science History Association. The sessions brought together scholars from a variety of disciplines and cohorts who held divergent ideas about the links between social science and history and different substantive agendas for explaining historical change. A mix of essays that highlight new methodologies for analyzing the past and pieces that offer explanations or remedies, the articles printed here point to some of the central issues in the debate about what social science history might mean today.

The Individual/Agent and Culture/Structure in the History of the Social Sciences

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline B. Brettell
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Individual Agent ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Human Condition

In facing up to the problem of structure and agency social theorists are not just addressing crucial theoretical problems in the study of society, they are also confronting the most pressing social problem of the human condition.

scholarly journals An Architecture by means of Anthropology. Beyond learning the tools of social science

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ester Gisbert Alemany
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Core ◽  
Core Method ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Realm ◽  
The Times

Architects and urban planners have traditionally considered social sciences to learn their tools, particularly the ones that allow them to analyse and describe the environments and the people for whom they work. This has led architects to develop better tools of observation and description of the social realm and not only the material one. Nevertheless, most of the times this interdisciplinary approach has identified social sciences, and specially anthropology, with ethnography. This paper departs from the critique of this identification made by anthropologist Tim Ingold and focuses in what he proposes is the core method of anthropology, participant observation. Then it reviews several recent proposals of social scientists who are searching for a non-representational more future oriented discipline. Which is an aim more related to that of architects. This paper tries to imagine how this transdisciplinary practice could look like.

scholarly journals Notes on the Method of World-System Biography

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevan Harris ◽  
Brendan McQuade
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World System ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
Methodological Nationalism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual

C. Wright Mills boiled the social sciences down to one sentence: “They are attempts to help us understand biography and history, and the connections between the two in a variety of social structures.” This special issue considers biography as an fruitful entry point into macro-historical sociology. With lineages from Marx and Weber to Wallerstein and Bourdieu, the sociology of the individual can produce a clearer path between the muddy oppositions of structure and agency or the longue durée and the event. This special issue unbinds biography from methodological nationalism and the teleology of great men tales. Instead, we aim to show how individuals are "a world within a world," an acting subject structured within world historical time and place.

scholarly journals Free Will, Determinism and the “Problem” of Structure and Agency in the Social Sciences

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Pleasants
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust

The so-called “problem” of structure and agency is clearly related to the philosophical problem of free will and determinism, yet the central philosophical issues are not well understood by theorists of structure and agency in the social sciences. In this article I draw a map of the available stances on the metaphysics of free will and determinism. With the aid of this map the problem of structure and agency will be seen to dissolve. The problem of structure and agency is sustained by a failure to distinguish between metaphysical and empirical senses of the relation between social structure and individual agency. The ramifications of this distinction are illustrated via a case study of competing explanations of perpetrator behavior in Christopher Browning’s and Daniel Goldhagen’s studies of the German Order Police in the Holocaust.

The Challenges Posed to Welfare States by Globalization

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-464
Author(s):  
Chaim Shinar
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Development ◽  
Economic Constraints ◽  
Long Term Trend ◽  
The Welfare State

When the debate on globalization started in the early 1990s, the dominant assumption was that globalization was a shocking new phenomenon. Moreover, this new development was seen as an attempt to undermine the sovereignty and economic functions of the nation state, hence undermining the fundamental basis of the welfare state. According to this perspective, the welfare state was expected to collapse as a result of economic constraints. Some influential publications promoted the idea that countries would find themselves captured in a global trap. At least in the field of social sciences, this thesis was interpreted differently: the weakening of the nation state by globalization was considered a myth that served as an excuse for cutting government budgets. Since then, the social sciences have developed an approach to globalization as a long-term trend within the capitalistic framework, driven by economic and political developments and dependent on pre-existing social conditions.

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