scholarly journals A guilty pleasure: The legal, social scientific and feminist verdict against rap

2021 ◽  
pp. 136248062110282
Author(s):  
Ummni Khan

This article draws on governance theory, critical theory and cultural criminology to interrogate how legal, social scientific and feminist discourses converge to construct rap music as a pressing social problem. While each discourse has its own preoccupations, ideologies and internal contestation, the overarching message is that rap music is a potential source of danger that conveys anti-social attitudes. Suspicion is sometimes also cast on musicians themselves. While I compare three overlapping fields, the ultimate purpose is to problematize the supposedly progressive approach to interpreting and mobilizing against songs deemed harmful. Significantly, I argue that much of the social science scholarship and feminist activism that addresses hip hop music perpetuates anti-Black stereotypes and dovetails with repressive state apparatuses. Among other things, social science and feminist criticism of rap hermeneutically support the use of rap lyrics as evidence of criminality—a distinctly non-progressive, racialized legal practice.

Author(s):  
Alison Wylie

Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the second-wave women’s movement, they developed wide-ranging critiques of gender bias in the conceptual framework and methodology, as well as in the goals, institutions and practice of virtually all the social sciences; they argue that the social sciences both reflect and contribute to the sexism of the larger societies in which they are embedded. Alongside these critiques feminist practitioners have established constructive programmes of research that are intended to rectify the inadequacies of existing traditions of research and to address questions of concern to women. In this they are committed both to improving the disciplines in which they participate and to establishing a sound empirical and theoretical basis for feminist activism. This engagement of feminists with social science, as commentators and practitioners, raises a number of philosophical issues that have been addressed by feminist social scientists and philosophers. These include questions about ideals of objectivity and the role of contextual values in social scientific inquiry, the goals of feminist research, the forms of practice appropriate to these goals, and the responsibilities of feminist researchers to the subjects of inquiry and to those who may otherwise be affected by its conduct or results.


1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Fischer

The discipline of international relations faces a new debate of fundamental significance. After the realist challenge to the pervasive idealism of the interwar years and the social scientific argument against realism in the late 1950s, it is now the turn of critical theorists to dispute the established paradigms of international politics, having been remarkably successful in several other fields of social inquiry. In essence, critical theorists claim that all social reality is subject to historical change, that a normative discourse of understandings and values entails corresponding practices, and that social theory must include interpretation and dialectical critique. In international relations, this approach particularly critiques the ahistorical, scientific, and materialist conceptions offered by neorealists. Traditional realists, by contrast, find a little more sympathy in the eyes of critical theorists because they join them in their rejection of social science and structural theory. With regard to liberal institutionalism, critical theorists are naturally sympathetic to its communitarian component while castigating its utilitarian strand as the accomplice of neorealism. Overall, the advent of critical theory will thus focus the field of international relations on its “interparadigm debate” with neorealism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 126
Author(s):  
Fitriah Hanim ◽  
Sariyatun Sariyatun

Social Science lessons that have been in the school curriculum only exemplify and discuss material globally or nationally. And students pay less attention and are less interested because the scope is not in their environment. From these problems, in the social studies curriculum it is necessary to add local historical material related to the local culture. Which in this case is the national material on Islamic material in Indonesia and its cultural results, the example of that culture can be exemplified is Grebeg Suro Jipang. It is expected that from studying this material, students know the benefits of learning to preserve and can benefit from learning, at least from the meaning of the grebeg, the attitude that can be learned is social attitudes such as mutual cooperation, cooperation, and sharing with others. Nor do spiritual attitudes like gratitude.  


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Westra

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


1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Jo Maynes

Historical social science—which I understand to be analysis of change over time that is informed by the theories, methods, and questions of the social sciences—has in the past 25 or 30 years established itself as an important area of interdisciplinary study. It emerged at a point in time when, in the United States at least, several of the social science disciplines were dominated by positivist epistemologies and models drawn from the natural sciences. In practice, much of what has been understood as social science history has centered on the recovery and analysis of largely quantifiable sources that allowed the writing of the collective biography of large populations—the ordinary people arguably under-or unrepresented in classic historical accounts of previous eras. Drawing upon social-scientific traditions provided concepts and methodologies for analyzing processes that encompassed everyone, rather than merely the events dominated by an elite, and for studying relatively anonymous collectivities rather than merely the “great men.”


2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amos Yong

This article uses the recent work of sociologist Margaret M. Poloma to argue that developments in the sociology of Pentecostalism have the potential to revitalize a classical Pentecostal movement that can be otherwise understood as languishing. In particular, the social scientific study of benevolent service in various segments of the Pentecostal movement provides the springboard for the argument. After locating the interdisciplinary work of Poloma and her colleagues on godly love within the broader context of social science research in the last half century, this paper will explore its implications for the future and renewal of especially the classical Pentecostal movement, for Pentecostal theology and self-understanding, and for scholarship on Pentecostalism.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. e1400217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lennart Olsson ◽  
Anne Jerneck ◽  
Henrik Thoren ◽  
Johannes Persson ◽  
David O’Byrne

Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principles in resilience theory that cause disciplinary tensions between the social and natural sciences (system ontology, system boundary, equilibria and thresholds, feedback mechanisms, self-organization, and function). Third, we provide empirical evidence of the asymmetry in the use of resilience theory in ecology and environmental sciences compared to five relevant social science disciplines. Fourth, we contrast the unification ambition in resilience theory with methodological pluralism. Throughout, we develop the argument that incommensurability and unification constrain the interdisciplinary dialogue, whereas pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would better facilitate integrated sustainability research.


1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (6) ◽  
pp. 731-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Murdoch

Recently human geographers and sociologists have begun to focus on the prospects for theories without dualisms. As a result of research on technology, animals, and the environment, it has become evident that a human-centred perspective, which continually positions humans as the only significant actors, cannot adequately take into account the various nonhumans which make up our world and upon which we depend. In large part the human-centredness of much social science derives from a sharp divide, a dualism, between nature and society and between the work of natural and human scientists. In this paper I consider one attempt to transgress this divide and assess the prospects for theories of this kind. The focus here is upon actor-network theory (ANT), an approach developed by Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, and John Law within social studies of science. I first outline the social studies which form the background to the development of ANT and then go on to elaborate the main contours of the approach, with particular emphasis on its transgression of the nature—society distinction. I conclude with a critical assessment of its strengths and weaknesses and attempt to show how it might be usefully combined with other, more traditional, social scientific concerns.


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