Social Change and the Defense of the West

2019 ◽  
pp. 345-360
Author(s):  
Michael Howard
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
The West

Building hydrosocialism in Czechoslovakia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 610-633
Author(s):  
Jiří Janáč
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Communist Society ◽  
The West ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Reflexive Modernity ◽  
The 1960S

Throughout the period of state socialism, water was viewed as an instrument of immense transformative power and water experts were seen as guardians of such transformation, a transformation for which we coin the term 'hydrosocialism'. A reconfiguration of water, a scarce and vital natural resource, was to a great extent identified with social change and envisioned transition to socialist and eventually communist society. While in the West, hydraulic experts (hydrocrats) and the vision of a 'civilising mission' of water management (hydraulic mission) gradually faded away with the arrival of reflexive modernity from the 1960s, in socialist Czechoslovakia the situation was different. Despite the fact they faced analogous challenges (environmental issues, economisation), the technocratic character of state socialism enabled socialist hydraulic engineers to secure their position and belief in transformative powers of water.

scholarly journals Envisioning Climate Change Adaptation Futures Using Storytelling Workshops

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 6630
Author(s):  
Rachel Harcourt ◽  
Wändi Bruine de Bruin ◽  
Suraje Dessai ◽  
Andrea Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Climate Change Adaptation ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Adaptation Planning ◽  
The West ◽  
Community Or ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Government

Engaging people in preparing for inevitable climate change may help them to improve their own safety and contribute to local and national adaptation objectives. However, existing research shows that individual engagement with adaptation is low. One contributing factor to this might be that public discourses on climate change often seems dominated by overly negative and seemingly pre-determined visions of the future. Futures thinking intends to counter this by re-presenting the future as choice contingent and inclusive of other possible and preferable outcomes. Here, we undertook storytelling workshops with participants from the West Yorkshire region of the U.K. They were asked to write fictional adaptation futures stories which: opened by detailing their imagined story world, moved to events that disrupted those worlds, provided a description of who responded and how and closed with outcomes and learnings from the experience. We found that many of the stories envisioned adaptation as a here-and-now phenomenon, and that good adaptation meant identifying and safeguarding things of most value. However, we also found notable differences as to whether the government, local community or rebel groups were imagined as leaders of the responsive actions, and as to whether good adaptation meant maintaining life as it had been before the disruptive events occurred or using the disruptive events as a catalyst for social change. We suggest that the creative futures storytelling method tested here could be gainfully applied to support adaptation planning across local, regional and national scales.

scholarly journals Cyclical theories of social change: Spengler and Toynbee

Sociologija ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 289-312
Author(s):  
Dragoljub Kaurin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
The West ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Historical Cycles ◽  
Proper Unit ◽  
Oswald Spengler

This paper is centrally concerned with discussing critically and rethinking the theoretical concepts put forward by Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West and Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History. It focuses on the theoretical, heuristic and epistemological value of these theories in the era of renaissance of philosophic history in some quarters (see for example Graham, 2002) and cooperation between social sciences. Spengler is credited with the idea of historical cycles, rethinking of the progressivist view and discovering a radically different approach to the study of the human past, which is embodied in his idea of culture as the proper unit for historical and sociological study. However, some of his views proved to be intrinsically intellectually dubious, but on the whole, his was a major contribution to the study of social change. Arnold Toynbee on the other hand was more empirically and sociologically oriented, while Spengler?s views are more heavily philosophical. Toynbee partly developed his ideas rather consistently, but at the same time included many unclear and inaccurate points in his theory. Both authors can be rightfully considered to be classical authors in this field and both provided incentive for studies that cross-cut social sciences (philosophy, history, sociology). Moreover, Decline of the West and A Study of History are truly post-disciplinary works.

The Postcolonial Avant-Garde and the Claim to Futurity: Edwar al-Kharrat’s Ethics of Tentative Innovation

2018 ◽  
pp. 147-163
Author(s):  
Adam Spanos
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Expressions

This chapter delinks the avant-garde from the contingent cultural expressions of imperialism prevalent at the time of its emergence in Europe and speculates on the possibility of an avant-garde not aggrandized by foreign domination. Like his Surrealist counterparts in the West, Egyptian writer Edwar al-Kharrat aimed to produce total social change by means of obscure rather than didactic references. He did so not to shock his compatriots out of bourgeois complacency, however, but to stimulate them to more autonomous thinking about the history of their subjection to neocolonial and dictatorial forms of authority. Al-Kharrat arranged a literary mosaic comprising scenes of transhistorical suffering without causal narrative, leaving readers to produce a representation of historical time adequate to understanding them. Al-Kharrat’s work suggests the terms of an avant-garde relying on humility rather than egoism for its effect, and mobilizing anachronism rather than

Buddhist Nationalism and Burmese Christianity

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-167
Author(s):  
Pum Za Mang
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Religion ◽  
The Cross ◽  
World Christianity ◽  
Political Milieu

Buddhist nationalists in Burma have characterised Christianity as a Western religion and accused Christians in the country of being more loyal to the West than to the motherland. This essay, however, argues that Christianity is not Western, but global, and that Christians in Burma are not followers of the West, but Burmese who remain as loyal to their homeland as do their fellow Burmese. It is stressed in this article that the indigenous form of Christianity after the exodus of the missionaries from Burma in 1966 has proved that Burmese Christianity should be seen not as a Western religion, but as a part of world Christianity. This article also contends that a combination of social change, political milieu, tribal religion and the cross-cultural appropriation of the gospel has contributed to religious conversion among the ethnic Chin, Kachin and Karen from tribal religion to Christianity.

scholarly journals The Migrant Metaphor Within Radical Italian Thought

2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Ingrid M. Hoofd
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
New World Order ◽  
The West ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Eu Policies ◽  
The Eu ◽  
Do So

NoBorder activisms and Italian philosophies are highly complicit in the ongoing fortification of the EU and the West, and of the West’s subsequent global hegemonic spread through Eurocentric discourses and technologies. I will show that many radical Italian writings, through a metaphorisation of the ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’, supplement the alter-globalisation movement in effectively reproducing the Eurocentric fantasy of the Enlightenment subject as the ultimate centre for social change, just as much as those despised EU policies do. I will do so by pointing out that this migrant metaphor functions primarily as a tool to make possible the claim for some sort of hegemonic ‘unification of struggles’ in ‘the new world order’ by these radical Italian thinkers. They will be shown to do so through a doubly romanticising move, leading to both the reproduction of the migrant or refugee as a heroic figure and the acting out of an unfinishable desire for communal self-identification with the migrant, through claims that s/he embodies the transcendental fantasy of the total subsumption of boundaries.

“The Great Brotherhood of the West”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ohio Valley ◽  
The West

Chapter Four examines evolving definitions of loyalty after emancipation and black enlistment, contending that the Ohio Valley, with its persistent Copperheadism, was perhaps the last place in the United States where sectionalism, a form of geographic identity associated with the politics of slavery and civil war, destabilized regionalism. Again, soldiers and civilians adapted the language of region and race either to back or to reject social change. Although Copperheadism dissolved following Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864, its racial, regional, and economic language was repurposed during the postconflict era by enemies of Reconstruction.

Tradition and Modernity Revisited

1968 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rajni Kothari
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conceptual Schemes ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Political Modernization ◽  
Short Span ◽  
Proletarian Revolution ◽  
Simultaneous Change ◽  
Industrial Revolutions

EPOCHS OF MAJOR SOCIAL CHANGE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SPURT to intense intellectual effort. The emergence of the new nations and their economic and political modernization constitutes one such epoch in history. The phenomenon has demanded from the student of society new modes of understanding and analysis, has provided him with both a challenge and an opportunity, and has called for new insights and a continuous re-fashioning of conceptual schemes. What is more, the nature of the change in these societies differs in significant respects from the experience of earlier epochs. It is neither the cumulative result of an outburst of creativity that marked the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West, nor a sharp break with the past brought about by a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ revolution, although undoubtedly both of these strands are involved in varying proportions. A deliberate attempt at condensing several centuries into a short span, the occurrence of ‘simultaneous change’ in so many spheres of life, the phenomenon of cultural dualism in so many societies, and the complex interactions caused by the constant closing in of national and international horizons, have led to a situation of continuous flux and readjustment that seems to have neither a beginning, nor possibly an end.

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