The violence of ideology

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Anthony Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Meaningful Change ◽  
The Status ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
As If

This chapter asks a simple question – if we know the problematic nature of capitalism and its attendant harms and inequalities, why can’t we fix it? The answer lies in an account of ideology which lies in action, not thought – we know there are problems but act as if we do not. The disavowal of problematic working conditions – and other significant issues such as environmental harm, migration and automation – makes it difficult to challenge the status quo and enact meaningful change. The search for human recognition and flourishing is hampered by the progressive search for change within the existing system rather than contemplating a different set of social relations and structures. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for ‘fixing the harms of work’ which centre around the need for social science to reconnect with analysis of political economy and problematise capitalism in a way that demands consideration of alternatives.

scholarly journals Reason and Political Economy in Hume

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik W. Matson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
Economic Liberty ◽  
Treatise Of Human Nature ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
The Status

This paper examines some connections between Hume’s epistemology in his Treatise of Human Nature and his political economy. I make three claims: (1) First, I argue that it is the development of Hume’s account of the faculty of reason in Book I of the Treatise that leads him to emphasize social science—including political economy—and the humanities over more abstract modes of intellectual inquiry. (2) Second, I argue that Hume’s conception of reason has implications for his methodology in political economy. His perception of human reason leads him to deploy a method of qualified generalization that emphasizes the by-and-large nature of theoretical statements. (3) Third, when it comes to policy matters, the method of qualified generalization in theory cashes out in terms of practical maxims. I suggest that two central maxims in Hume’s political economy derive from his views of the usefulness of economic liberty and the coordinating nature of the status quo.

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

scholarly journals Against the Grain: Socially Just Social Science from the Standpoint of Roxana Ng (Review Essay)

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-159
Author(s):  
Elaine Coburn
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
The Political ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Varied Work

This contribution seeks to highlight the important scholarship of Roxana Ng, arguably one of Canadian sociology and political economy’s most underappreciated theorists. Like her activism, Ng’s academic work is both wide-ranging yet firmly focused on major, unjust inequalities. Her research particularly concerns the Canadian capitalist political economy but inevitably, given the embeddedness of these social relations within worldwide historical relations, stretches beyond national borders. In particular, Ng sought to unpack the everyday, intertwined – exploitative and unjust – relations of class, race, and gender, and the ways these unjust relations are articulated through migration and citizenship. This contribution situates the reception and uneven uptake of Ng’s varied work before critically analysing her contributions to understanding (1) immigrant women’s labour in Canada, (2) the complex racialized, gendered relations of power in the academy, and (3) the liberatory potential of embodied epistemologies, specifically Qi Gong meditation. In the conclusions, I consider the overall contributions and some contradictions of her work, in moving from the local to the global, and from the personal to the political.

Performing Development

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah C. M. Bulloch
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Local Government ◽  
International Development ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Parallel Structures ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economy Of Development ◽  
Development Initiatives

This chapter focuses on development as a “civic project.” It explores local symbols of orchestrated community-wide development, including infrastructure, ceremony and signage. The chapter argues that a defining feature of such symbols is a concern with development as a performative display. Tied as they are to clientelist politics, local government-led development initiatives are largely about “branding” both projects and people in their patron’s name, (re)producing webs of utang kabubut-on(debt of obligation), intended to reinforce the status quo. Entangled in this local political economy of development, are international bilateral and multilateral agencies, equipped with the latest international development orthodoxy and a remit to work in “partnership” with the local government. The incommensurability of these approaches is revealed when “partnership” morphs into a system of largely separate and parallel structures for implementing local development.

Accommodations

Outsiders ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 111-134
Author(s):  
Zachary Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Meaningful Change ◽  
Common Experience ◽  
Exchange Of Information ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
Vexing Problem

Accommodations are a common feature of life, but a vexing problem in civil rights law. To accommodate is to disrupt the status quo, to regard another, to recognize one’s needs and humanity. Accommodations can be a powerful thing. Even brief accommodations are an exchange of information, which become crucial experiences, as they force us to reckon with a harsh truth: The idea that all people are created equal is a legal command, not a practical description. We all have different needs and capabilities, different beliefs and wants. We accommodate not to erase these differences but to respect them. As a vehicle to realize our ambitions, and a functional means to make equality real for everyone in need of respect, accommodations are a way to bring outsiders in. As a result, accommodation is the antidote to modern discrimination. As we turn inward, as individuality becomes the common experience, accommodation is the right tool for our time. It is a means of making meaningful change.

Coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurgen Poesche
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Minority Status ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The Status ◽  
Sub Saharan

The objective of this article is to contribute to the development of a common narrative on coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. Since scholars tend to focus on either Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, a gap between these important regions has emerged in the literature on coloniality. This article seeks to bridge this gap by providing a comparative perspective on coloniality, and this hopefully will enhance Indigenous African nations’ and Indigenous American nations’ understanding of what needs to be done to overcome coloniality. The article explores three key theses. First, in spite of the differences in the extant societal power structures in the postcolonial African states and the former settler colonial states in the Americas, this article argues that the continued dynamics of coloniality are similar in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. The minority status of Indigenous American nations throughout the Americas renders addressing coloniality more challenging than in Sub-Saharan Africa where Indigenous African nations are in the majority although they generally do not have effective sovereignty. Second, the extant societal power structures associated with both coloniality and occidental modernity have weaponized occidental jurisprudence, natural science and social science to defend and proliferate the status quo assisted by state sovereignty. Addressing coloniality effectively therefore requires a renaissance of Indigenous African and Indigenous American cosmovisions unaffected by modernity. Third, addressing coloniality in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas requires the recognition of the comprehensive and supreme sovereignty of the Indigenous African nations in all of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Indigenous American nations in all of the Americas.

Old Tools and New Movements in Latin America: Political Science as Gatekeeper or Intellectual Illuminator?

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara C. Motta
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
The Status ◽  
State Form

AbstractThis article argues that social democratic and orthodox Marxist conceptualizations of politics are unable to “engage in solidarity” with many new forms of Latin American popular politics. Such movements challenge the politics of representation, the market economy, and the state form by reinventing territorialized experiments in self-government, which politicize place, subjectivities, and social relations. Developing a critique of these frameworks of political analysis, this article argues that conceptual categories combining the insights of autonomist or open Marxism and poststructuralism and the critical reflections and theorizations by Latin America's newest social movements enable a deeper engagement with such movements. This critique challenges academics committed to progressive social change to reexamine long-held notions about the nature and agents of social transformation and the epistemological categories that orient our research. It argues that if we fail to do this, then we risk becoming gatekeepers of the status quo.

scholarly journals Caught in the middle? Creating and contesting intermediary spaces in low-carbon transitions

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-133
Author(s):  
Bregje van Veelen
Keyword(s):  
Renewable Energy ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Transformational Change ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Energy Governance ◽  
The Status ◽  
Intermediary Organisations

The distributed nature of renewable energy has given rise to new forms and scales of energy governance, in particular the emerging role of households and community organisations in generating and distributing renewable energy. Accompanying this trend has been the emergence of intermediary organisations, whose role it is to mediate between these actors cf. the market and the state, with the aim to move from local experimentation to widespread transformational change. While in recent years a significant body of research has emerged that has considered intermediary functions, less is known about intermediary spaces. By tracing how intermediary spaces are shaped, negotiated, protected, and expanded, this article makes three contributions to the literature on energy governance and low-carbon intermediaries. First, a focus on the relational nature of intermediary spaces challenges the community/state binary in energy governance. Second, it highlights the power dynamics behind these emergent relational spaces; showing such spaces are not neutral, but produced through social relations within and beyond them, affecting the functions that intermediaries seek to fulfil. Third, it provides an understanding of how the ever-changing nature of intermediary spaces can also enable new spaces for action to emerge and challenge the status quo.

Agents of change: the Gaston Labat awardees past, present, and future—the 2021 Gaston Labat Award lecture

2021 ◽  
pp. rapm-2021-103116
Author(s):  
F Kayser Enneking
Keyword(s):  
Change Agents ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Meaningful Change ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
The Status ◽  
To Come

The prior recipients of the Gaston Labat Award can be thought of as change agents because of their driving desire to challenge and improve the status quo. All of us are interconnected and should seek to collectively work toward meaningful change in our communities. The 2021 Gaston Labat lecture pays tribute to past agents of change and inspires those to come by urging everyone to become involved in the solution.

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