In defence of social psychology attending to the institutional dimension: Potentialities for extending comprehension of the ecological and political

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Paula Castro
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Psychology ◽  
Natura 2000 ◽  
Human Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Institutional Facts ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Institutional Dimension ◽  
The Eu

Abstract In this article I have the following goals: to enter the debate on what defines social psychology as a social science, arguing that it is the prominence conceded to a focus on agreed ‐ not natural ‐ limits to human action; to add to this debate a further distinction ‐ that between social facts and cultural/institutional facts ‐ together with a theorization of the later highlighting the relevance of attending to the (de)legitimization of institutions; to extract consequences of this position for social psychology; finally, to offer two cases illustrating and hopefully clarifying the set of theoretical arguments and concepts I used before: Sophocles' Antigone, and the EU debate on Natura 2000, both evidencing a tension between the legal and the legitimate. I conclude by suggesting that such a social psychology can work together with the social sciences to ask questions productive for extending our knowledge of the ecological and the political.

Joint Commitment Model of Collective Beliefs

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 55-73
Author(s):  
Alban Bouvier ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Phenomena ◽  
Joint Commitment ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Margaret Gilbert ◽  
The Social ◽  
Collective Beliefs ◽  
The One

For almost three decades, Margaret Gilbert has introduced a new account of social facts taking “joint commitments”, not only explicit but also implicit, as the cement of sociality properly understood. Gilbert has used this original account of collective phenomena to clarify a variety of issues, both in the philosophy of rights and in the philosophy of the social sciences. This paper focuses on the latter domain; it argues that although Durkheim and Mauss are central references in her pioneering work, On Social Facts, Gilbert’s model has been underestimated in the fields of sociology and anthropology. This may come from the fact that Gilbert provides the reader with only imaginary examples. To overcome this difficulty, Bouvier investigates several historical examples in two related domains:, the political and the religious. Another reason for this relative lack of interest may come from Gilbert’s very unconventional interpretation of the Durkheimian explanation of social beliefs. Although, on the one hand, her “contractualist” (or Rousseauist) interpretation permits a sharp illumination of certain social facts, it may, on the other hand, impede the recognition of the specificity of other kinds of beliefs, which sociologists and anthropologists—including Durkheim—usually consider as collective beliefs. Bouvier, by contrast, introduces alternative models, illustrating them with similar, although ultimately distinct from previous, historical examples.

“We Speak the Truth!”

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Sari Hanafi
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Social Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Qualifications

This study investigates the preachers and their Friday sermons in Lebanon, raising the following questions: What are the profiles of preachers in Lebanon and their academic qualifications? What are the topics evoked in their sermons? In instances where they diagnosis and analyze the political and the social, what kind of arguments are used to persuade their audiences? What kind of contact do they have with the social sciences? It draws on forty-two semi-structured interviews with preachers and content analysis of 210 preachers’ Friday sermons, all conducted between 2012 and 2015 among Sunni and Shia mosques. Drawing from Max Weber’s typology, the analysis of Friday sermons shows that most of the preachers represent both the saint and the traditional, but rarely the scholar. While they are dealing extensively with political and social phenomena, rarely do they have knowledge of social science

The Politics of Global Health Inequalities

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-84
Author(s):  
Yusra Ribhi Shawar ◽  
Jennifer Prah Ruger
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Global Health ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Health Inequality ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Health ◽  
Political Determinants ◽  
The Social

Careful investigations of the political determinants of health that include the role of power in health inequalities—systematic differences in health achievements among different population groups—are increasing but remain inadequate. Historically, much of the research examining health inequalities has been influenced by biomedical perspectives and focused, as such, on ‘downstream’ factors. More recently, there has been greater recognition of more ‘distal’ and ‘upstream’ drivers of health inequalities, including the impacts of power as expressed by actors, as well as embedded in societal structures, institutions, and processes. The goal of this chapter is to examine how power has been conceptualised and analysed to date in relation to health inequalities. After reviewing the state of health inequality scholarship and the emerging interest in studying power in global health, the chapter presents varied conceptualisations of power and how they are used in the literature to understand health inequalities. The chapter highlights the particular disciplinary influences in studying power across the social sciences, including anthropology, political science, and sociology, as well as cross-cutting perspectives such as critical theory and health capability. It concludes by highlighting strengths and limitations of the existing research in this area and discussing power conceptualisations and frameworks that so far have been underused in health inequalities research. This includes potential areas for future inquiry and approaches that may expand the study of as well as action on addressing health inequality.

Book Reviews: Studies in Sociology, Race Mixture, Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe, Interpretations, 1931–1932, Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science, The Reorganisation of Education in China, Social Decay and Eugenical Reform, The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Revolutionary Era, L. T. Hobhouse, His Life and Work, Corner of England, World Agriculture—An International Study, Small-Town Stuff, Methods of Social Study, Does History Repeat Itself? The New Morality, Culture and Progress, Language and Languages: An Introduction to Linguistics, The Theory of Wages, The Santa Clara Valley, California, Social Psychology, A History of Fire and Flame, Sin and New Psychology, Sociology and Education, Mental Subnormality and the Local Community: Am Outline or a Practical Program, Tyneside Council op Social Service, Reconstruction and Education in Rural India, The Contribution of the English Le Play School to Rural Sociology, Kagami Kenkyu Hokoku, President's, Pioneer Settlement: Co-Operative Studies, Birth Control and Public Health, Pioneer Settlement: Co-Operative Studies, Ourselves and the World: The Making of an American Citizen, The Emergence of the Social Sciences from Moral Philosophy, The Comparable Interests of the Old Moral Philosophy and the Modern Social Sciences, The World in Agony, Sheffield Social Survey Committee, Housing Problems in Liverpool, Council for the Preservation of Rural England, Forest Land Use in Wisconsin, The Growth Cycle of the Farm Family, The Farmer's Guide to Agricultural Research in 1931, A History of the Public Library Movement in Great Britain and Ireland, The Retirement of National Debts, Public and Private Operation of Railways in Brazil, The Indian Minorities Problem, The Meaning of the Manchurian Crisis, The Drama of the Kingdom, Social Psychology, Competition in the American Tobacco Industry, New York School Centers and Their Community Policy, Desertion of Alabama Troops from the Confederate Army, Plans for City Police Jails and Village Lockups

1933 ◽  
Vol a25 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-109
Author(s):  
R. R. Marbtt ◽  
E. E. Evans-Pritchard ◽  
E. O. Jambs ◽  
Florence Ayscough ◽  
C. H. Desch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Agricultural Research ◽  
Public Library ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pioneer Settlement

The Distribution of Emotions: Affective Politics of Emancipation

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well‐known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics.

The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in Quetelet's Statistics

1985 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Social

“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.” The social sciences have known no truer follower of Laplace's dictum than Adolphe Quetelet. His mécanique sociale, later physique sociale, was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace's mecanique celeste, and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the presumed method of celestial physics, but even to its concepts and vocabulary. It is too weak to say that Quetelet's goal was the transmission of the achievements of celestial physics into the social sphere. He aspired to nothing less than imitation.

scholarly journals Making Home(s) in Displacement

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilde Heynen
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
The Political ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interdisciplinary Scholarship ◽  
Architectural Perspective ◽  
The Relationship

Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.

“The Burdens of Urban History”: Comment

1989 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 30-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Katznelson
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social History ◽  
Urban History ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
The City

How, if at all, can studies of the city help us understand the distinctive qualities of the American regime? In “The Burdens of Urban History,” which refines and elaborates his earlier paper “The Problem of the Political in Recent American Urban History,” Terrence McDonald, a historian who has written on urban fiscal policy and conflict, argues that students of the city have focused their work too narrowly on bosses and machines, patronage and pluralism. In so doing, they have obscured other bases of politics and conflict, and, trapped by liberal categories of analysis, they have perpetuated a self-satisfied, even celebratory, portrait of American politics and society. This unfortunate directionality to urban research in some measure has been unwitting because historians and social scientists have been unreflective about the genealogies, and mutual borrowings, of their disciplines. Even recent critical scholarship in the new social history and in the social sciences under the banner of “bringing the state back in” suffers from these defects. As a result, these treatments of state and society relationships, and of the themes that appear under the rubric of American “exceptionalism,” are characterized by an epistemological mish-mash, a contraction of analytical vision, and an unintended acquiescence in the self-satisfied cheerleading of the academy that began in the postwar years.

Political Science as a Discipline: A Statement by the Committee on Standards of Instruction of the American Political Science Association

1962 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 417-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel A. Almond ◽  
Eric C. Bellquist ◽  
Joseph M. Ray ◽  
John P. Roche ◽  
Irvin Stewart ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Psychology ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
American Political Science Association ◽  
Conceptual Schemes ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Political Science ◽  
Factual Data ◽  
Science Association

Political science is a basic discipline in the social sciences. Although it must necessarily maintain close scholarly association with the disciplines of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, geography, and social psychology, political science cannot be considered a part of any of these other social sciences. Political science has its own area of human experience to analyze, its own body of descriptive and factual data to gather, its own conceptual schemes to formulate and test for truth.

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