More on the Missing Half Second

boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-238
Author(s):  
Jap-Nanak Makkar
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Social Explanations

This review essay compares two early and two recent texts by N. Katherine Hayles and Mark B. N. Hansen. Considering their recent work in the context of Ruth Leys’s critique of the turn to affect, I argue that Hayles and Hansen use neuroscientific conclusions on a “missing half second” to propose theories of technology’s impact. These critics neglect to provide explanations of a social or political kind, a trend that appears to be related to the lesser importance accorded to intention. I show the value of giving social explanations and of differentiating between humans and things in analyses.

Recent Work on Latin American Women: A Review Essay

1975 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-516
Author(s):  
Susan A. Soeiro
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Dominant Male ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
American Women ◽  
Male Group ◽  
As If

The recent literature on women in Latin America as yet forms a minute part of a necessary revision aimed at achieving a balanced and multidimensional view of the Ibero-American reality, past and present. Men, as the traditional transmitters of culture in society, have conveyed what they knew, understood, and judged to be important. Since women's activities differed considerably from those of men, they were regarded as insignificant and unworthy of mention. Scholars have further perpetuated the patriarchal and sexist assumptions of their own societies or those they have studied. As a fesult, more than four and a half centuries of history and all of the important ongoing processes of modernization, urbanization, professionalization, and even propagation seem to have occurred without the participation or even the presence of women. It was simply assumed that what was said of men held equally true for women. Hence the conception of reality perpetrated by social scientists and historians was that perceived by a dominant male group, who represented a partial construct as if it were a more complex whole.

The Saints Embalmed. Scientists, Latitudinarians, and Society: A Review Essay

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Jacob ◽  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Social Origins ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Times

Slightly more than two decades ago in an article entitled “Scientists and society: the saints preserved” we began an historiographical intervention into the debate about the social origins of modern science. In that 1971 review essay we argued that recent work on the Restoration latitudinarians, particularly the important contribution of Barbara Shapiro, did not adequately account for the role played in latitudinarian thought by political and ecclesiastical interests. The time has come to return to the discussion. This occasion has been presented by the publication of a book of essays written for a conference held in 1987 at the Clark Library, entitled Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, and edited by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin. The volume constitutes one of the few recent contributions to an important debate about science and religion that was noisy in the 1970s and largely ignored during the Tory backlash of the 1980s. But the times are finally changing, and revitalization may now be occurring in British cultural and intellectual history. The newly edited volume stands at the cusp of the revitalization. It struggles to move forward to fresher approaches toward culture, i.e. toward the view that texts require historical and linguistic location. Yet the volume is trapped by those few contributors who are still wedded to conventions and attitudes now largely confined to the high churchmen of the 1980s.The volume revolves around two themes: the nature of liberal English Protestantism after 1660 and the contested role of science in that mental and social construct. These are themes basic to English historiography in this century, if not before, and they are very much associated with the writings of Robert Merton and Christopher Hill. Their work largely focused on the mid-century Puritans; in the 1970s attention turned to the latitudinarians and their scientific associates, from Boyle to Newton.

On decolonial revisions of modern social theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 704-719
Author(s):  
Su-ming Khoo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Academic Work ◽  
Public Sociology ◽  
New Work ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Civic Spaces ◽  
Critical Project

This review essay discusses decolonial and revisionist approaches to the sociological canon, centring on a major new work, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood (2021). The challenge to ‘classical’ social theory and the demand to reconstitute the theory curriculum come in the context of increased visibility for wider decolonial agendas, linked to ‘fallist’ protests in South Africa, Black Lives Matter and allied antiracist organizing, and calls to decolonize public and civic spaces and institutions such as universities, effect museum restitution, and colonial reparations. The review identifies continuities and complementarities with Connell’s critique of the sociological canon, though Colonialism and Modern Social Theory takes a different tack from Connell’s Southern Theory (2009). Bhambra and Holmwood’s opening of sociology’s canon converges with Connell’s recent work to align a critical project of global and decolonial public sociology with a pragmatic programme for doing academic work differently.

Review Essay: Recent Work on Toleration

2018 ◽  
Vol 80 (4) ◽  
pp. 701-708 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa M. Bejan
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Global World

Not so long ago, a unified chorus of scholars, politicians, and activists declared that the time had come to move “beyond” toleration. Such an offensive orientation of de haut en bas indulgence towards difference may have been appropriate to warring Christian sects after the Reformation. But in this brave, new, and emphatically global world of unprecedented cultural, racial, and gender diversity, “mere” and musty toleration must give way to something more—to respect, recognition, even acceptance, or perhaps a positive conception of tolerance comprising the better features of all three.

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