scholarly journals Bridging the Gap: Image, Discourse, and Beyond – Towards a Critical Theory of Visual Representation

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-89
Author(s):  
Antonia Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Visual Discourse ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Visual Artifacts ◽  
Linguistic Material

Pictures and images play a central role in contemporary society. Not only do they mediate meaning in a seemingly universal language (Fromm 1981), but their relevance for the construction of perception and beliefs cannot be underestimated. In global, political and religious discourses, controversies often revolve around images. The influence visuality has on the forming of ideas has already been discussed in the 1930s (Freud 1932). Today, even neurobiologists acknowledge the influential power of mental images (Hüther 2004).  But, despite the well acknowledged impact the Pictorial Turn has had up to date, discourse analyses are typically carried out solely on linguistic material. Nevertheless, even in the Foucauldian sense the term “discourse” relates to epistemes and power not only conveyed by language, but also by pictures and images, in “a mushy mixture of the articulable and the visible” (Deleuze 2006).  Nonetheless, the specific characteristics of pictures and images render analysis ever more difficult. Visual representations are a case sui generis. They cannot be transcribed into language completely. Research on visual artifacts can be put to work as a disclosure of how symbolic orders and the accordant identities are constructed. Something present, a picture or an image, is analyzed with regard to its ideological implications, as studies related to Cultural Studies usually do. Yet, beyond the visible picture, if representation is the making-present of something that’s absent (Pitkin 1967), what respectively who is being made absent by the presence of the visible? The ambiguity of representation as “standing for” versus “depiction of” might at the same time enable a critical approach in the analysis of visual discourse. In this article, I attempt to conceptualize a methodological approach for conducting discourse analyses on visual material. For this purpose, I will introduce a dialectical notion of representativeness as imagery that draws on Gayatri C. Spivak’s critique and Hannah Fenichel Pitkin’s Political Theory of representation, as well as on Siegfried Kracauer’s deliberations on film. Finally, I am going to give an example for putting this approach into research practice.

Democracy and Unfreedom: Revisiting Tocqueville and Beaumont in America

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara M. Benson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Alexis De Tocqueville ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Democracy In America ◽  
Jacksonian America

This essay reexamines the famous 1831 prison tours of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. It reads the three texts that emerged from their collective research practice as a trilogy, one conventionally read in different disciplinary homes ( Democracy in America in political science, On the Penitentiary in criminology, and Marie, Or Slavery: A Novel of Jacksonian America in literature). I argue that in marginalizing the trilogy’s important critique of slavery and punishment, scholars have overemphasized the centrality of free institutions and ignored the unfree institutions that also anchor American political life. The article urges scholars in political theory and political science to attend to this formative moment in mass incarceration and carceral democracy.

Decadence and Realism

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-582
Author(s):  
Matthew Potolsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Realist Novels

This essay proposes a new understanding of the widely recognized disdain for realism and the realist novel among decadent writers, a disdain most critics have interpreted as a protomodernist celebration of artifice. Focusing on Oscar Wilde's dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” the essay argues instead that decadent antirealism is antimodern, embodying a repudiation of contemporary society. Decadent writers regard realism not as hidebound and traditional, as twentieth-century theorists would have it, but as terrifyingly modern. Wilde looks back to neoclassical theories of mimesis and classical Republican political theory to imagine a different, older world, one in which art improves upon brute reality and in which the artist stands apart from the social forces that realist novels make central to their literary universes.

Breaking the Transitional Justice Machine: Exploring Spatiality, Space Travel, and Inbetween Spaces in Research Practice

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-178
Author(s):  
Arnaud Kurze ◽  
Christopher K. Lamont
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Alternative Spaces ◽  
Justice Studies

Abstract This article offers a critical perspective on emerging and alternative spaces for emancipation within transitional justice studies. Taking into account recent critical literature and postcolonial interventions in transitional justice studies, we argue that barriers to moving our understanding of transitional justice forward are both conceptual and methodological. Conceptual hurdles are visible through narrow justice demands often limited to the context of post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings, thus normalizing injustice in liberal democratic and postcolonial contexts. Methodological impediments exist because transitional justice scholarship operates at a positivist level, or trying to explain certain, and desired, outcomes rather than destabilizing and unsettling unequal power relations. As a result, research practice in the field reflects the perspectives and preferences of elites in transition societies through a legal-technical mechanistic imagining of transitional justice that we refer to as the transitional justice machine. We argue that the needs and voices of marginalized social actors, particularly within states that are largely defined as liberal democratic or postcolonial, have long been ignored due to these practices. Against the backdrop of evolving agency patterns, including widespread global protest and demands to deal with the past across countries, we zoom in on a variety of actors who, until now, have not been at the focus of transitional justice studies. Drawing on a variety of case studies, this article contributes to the critical understanding of transitional justice studies as a Bourdieusian field. First, by expanding the conceptual lens to include racial, socio-economic, and postcolonial injustice, and, second, by advancing a more critical methodological approach that puts at its center unequal power relationships.

The Organization of Expert Activism: Shadow Mobilization in Two Social Movements*

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Frickel ◽  
Rebekah Torcasso ◽  
Annika Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Cumulative Risk ◽  
Alternative Agriculture ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Systematic Data ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Knowledge Based

The organization of expert activism is a problem of increasing importance for social movement organizers and scholars alike. Yet the relative invisibility of expert activists within social movements makes them difficult to systematically identify and study. This article offers two related ways forward. First, we advance a theory of “shadow mobilization” to explain the organization of expert activism in the broader context of proliferating risk and intensifying knowledge-based conflict. Second, we introduce a new methodological approach for collecting systematic data on members of this difficult-to-reach population. Findings from comparative analysis of expert activists in the environmental justice movement in Louisiana and the alternative agriculture movement in Washington reveal both important commonalities and fine-grained differences, suggesting that shadow mobilizations are strategic collective responses to cumulative risk in contemporary society.

The theoretical foundations of liberalism

1987 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
New Era ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Present Decade ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

The publication of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in 1972 inaugurated a new era in Anglo-American political theory by providing a sophisticated and complex paradigm of liberal political diagnosis of and prescription for contemporary society; it resulted in a flood of detailed analyses and discussions of Rawls' proposals in the large and in the small, and also brought forth (in the form of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia) a counterblast from the libertarian Right which was of commensurate scope and vigour. In the present decade, however, the challenge to Rawlsian liberalism has taken on a new guise—one which it is the purpose of this paper to explore.

scholarly journals The impact of content knowledge on the adoption of a critical curriculum model by history teachers-in-training

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Parra-Monserrat ◽  
Carlos Fuertes-Muñoz ◽  
Elvira Asensi-Silvestre ◽  
Juan Carlos Colomer-Rubio
Keyword(s):  
Secondary School ◽  
Primary Education ◽  
Master's Degree ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Curriculum Model ◽  
School Teaching ◽  
Master’S Degree ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis work analyses the impact of disciplinary training on future Primary and Secondary School teachers’ decision to adopt a critical approach for teaching history. To do this, we will use a two-phase mixed methodological approach (quantitative and qualitative) to analyse the relationship between their previous training and the use of epistemological and psycho-pedagogical objectives and paradigms as outlined in a critical curriculum model. As regards data collection in the first phase, a closed questionnaire was created and validated, using a Likert-style (1–5) evaluation scale. The data was codified using the statistical package SPSS v.26.0 for subsequent analysis. The selected sample included 215 students from a Spanish university on the following courses: Degree in Primary Education (n = 145) and Master’s Degree in Secondary School Teaching specialised in history and geography (n = 70). They were all in the last stage of their initial training. In the second phase, we selected some of the students to participate in discussion groups, where they were able to go into more depth with their answers. In this way, we could better understand the link between their disciplinary training and the adoption of a determined model of history education. To do this, we separated them into three groups with different profiles: students taking the Degree in Primary Education unrelated with History (n = 8), students taking the Degree in Primary Education specialised in arts and humanities (n = 8) and students taking the Master’s Degree in Secondary School Teaching specialised in history and geography (n = 8). The data was gathered using an open coding procedure, based on several categories, which allowed us to compare the different questionnaires. The results reveal significant differences between the different groups. As such, we can conclude as to the importance of mastering epistemological disciplinary knowledge to break with certain traditions which impede innovation and make the adoption of a critical educational model more difficult.

scholarly journals Feminist critique of liberalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erma Ivoš
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Political ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Radical Feminist ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Radical Transformation

In this essay the author deals with the achievement of feminist critiques of liberalism at the end of the century. The central thesis is the controversy of the public/private dichotomy as the main important position of the feminist argument. The differences between critical approach to the public/private dichotomy are explained through cultural, radical feminist and androginy arguments about the fact that the public sphere is patriarchaly constructed with strong effect to the private sphere. That is why feminist use the therm “liberal patriarchalism“. The author concludes that the political theory and practise are resistent to the feminist arguments, that radical transformation of democratic theory and practic is far from the possibility to be transformed what means that the context of feminism and its critique of liberalism will still remain the same.

scholarly journals THE EARLY ISLAMIC HISTORY RECORD ~METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 10-20
Author(s):  
Nadia RABII
Keyword(s):  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Islamic History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
History Record ◽  
The Times ◽  
Early Islamic

Historical knowledge has always occupied a distinctive status in human knowledge, as it can truly liberate humankind from their illusions and the transcendent conception of oneself and the past eras, which requires both objectivity and scientific approach. Therefore, I was keen on providing through this research, a historical study revolving mainly around the methodological, scientific, and critical approach, as well as its cognitive aspect in terms of the importance of content, in order to examine the current situation by studying the past. Therefore, a trustworthy historian is required to be based on his awareness of the conditions which he lives under, regardless of his geographical location. And he must wonder: isn’t it among the most crucial and important tasks of the historian, today, to be as equally invested in his current era and circumstances by being a legitimate thinker, even if he was dating back to previous eras ? Are we not supposed to benefit from the methods of experts in sociology and history and critical methodology, in the times where the Islamic minds stagnated, without neglecting the necessity to pay attention to the pitfalls of these curriculums? I have noticed that there has been a cruel indulgence in the early Islamic history record. This requires Muslim researchers, thinkers, and historians to dig deeper into the early Islamic past, as well as getting rid of the emotional reading because of how it impacts the way Muslims perceive their religion, history and how they subsequently react and relate to others who are different from them. This leads to increasing their extremist tendencies and intolerances.

On Macpherson's Developmental Liberalism

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian H. Angus
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Institutional Support ◽  
Liberal Theory ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Rigorous Analysis ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

The work of C. B. Macpherson is extremely significant for those seeking to understand the cul-de-sac which liberal political theory and institutions have entered. Considering the experience of socialist societies in this century, the necessity for a nonmarket political theory to retain a positive connection to Western liberal values should be beyond dispute. Any postmarket society requires, not pious reassurances, but institutional support for individual rights that are the most vehemently defended in the liberal tradition. But of course this is not enough. Contemporary society is already undermining liberal individualism through massive organizations and manipulated consumption. The inability of liberal theory to analyze effectively and propose alternatives to the contemporary decline of the individual suggests that the cul-de-sac is rooted in the conceptual foundations of liberalism itself. Macpherson's rigorous analysis of the market assumptions of liberal theory pinpoints this conceptual inadequacy and attempts to maintain a commitment to liberal values in a postmarket society.

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