scholarly journals Introduction to Special Collection: Social Science and the Social Life of Plastic

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Steger ◽  
Patrick O’Hare ◽  
Teresa Sandra Perez
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Wilkie

Inventing the Social, edited by Noortje Marres, Michael Guggenheim and Alex Wilkie, showcases recent efforts to develop new ways of knowing society that combine social research with creative practice. With contributions from leading figures in sociology, architecture, geography, design, anthropology, and digital media, the book provides practical and conceptual pointers on how to move beyond the customary distinctions between knowledge and art, and on how to connect the doing, researching and making of social life in potentially new ways. Presenting concrete projects with a creative approach to researching social life as well as reflections on the wider contexts from which these projects emerge, this collection shows how collaboration across social science, digital media and the arts opens up timely alternatives to narrow, instrumentalist proposals that seek to engineer behaviour and to design community from scratch. To invent the social is to recognise that social life is always already creative in itself and to take this as a starting point for developing different ways of combining representation and intervention in social life.


Author(s):  
Henry Louis Gates, Jr

Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western, sociopolitical concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment). This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social science and medical literature: some of the modern sciences employ racial and ethnic categories. As such, race has a physical, as opposed to a purely social, dimension. The book argues that in order to more fully understand what we mean by race, social scientists need to engage genetics, medicine, and health. To be sure, the long shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism have cast a pall over the effort to understand this complicated relationship between social science and race. But while the text rejects pseudoscience and hierarchical ways of looking at race, it makes the claim that it is time to reassess the Western-based, social construction paradigm. The chapters in this book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race: one between theories that see race as fixed or malleable; a second between the idea that race is a universal but modern Western concept and the idea that it has a deeper and more complicated cultural history; and a third between sociopolitical and biological/biomedical concepts of race. Arguing that race is not merely socially constructed, the chapters offer a collection of views on the way that social scientists must reconsider the idea of race in the age of genomics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 205979912097699
Author(s):  
Martyn Hammersley

This article examines the character of a small but detailed observational study that focused on two teams of researchers, one engaged in qualitative sociological research, the other developing statistical models. The study was presented as investigating ‘the social life of methods’, an approach seen by some as displacing conventional research methodology. The study drew on ethnomethodology, and was offered as a direct parallel with ethnographic and ethnomethodological investigations of natural scientists’ work by Science and Technology Studies scholars. In the articles deriving from this study, the authors show how even the statisticians relied on background qualitative knowledge about the social phenomena to which their data related. The articles also document routine practices employed by each set of researchers, some ‘troubles’ they encountered and how they dealt with these. Another theme addressed is whether the distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches accurately characterised differences between these researchers at the level of practical reasoning. While this research is presented as descriptive in orientation, concerned simply with documenting social science practices, it operates against a background of at least implicit critique. I examine its character and the closely associated criticism of social research methodology and conventional social science.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Febri Aris Susanto

Social Sciences is a subject that studies and discusses social issues in society. The learning process of a subject will take place well and smoothly if the teacher in delivering the material has strategies and methods in delivering it to the students. The purpose of this article is to describe the social science learning methodology from literature review analysis. The method used is to use various literature review on the social science learning methodology. The social science is a field of study in the learning process is expected to provide students to be responsible in social life. Somesocial science learning methodologies are tailored to the conditions of students and facilities available so as to provide good learning outcomes with indicators of mastery and student learning achievement.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (12) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Mehmet Turan ◽  
Eyüp Bozkurt

In today's changing and developing world, the most important elements that enable people to live together in society are values. The education of such values start in the family and the social environment that they are in, from the moment a person is born and do continue in school as the child starts to study. Schools teach values to their students through the programs they practice. One of the most important courses that these values are taught is the social sciences. Social sciences, which is formed to prepare the students for social life is also one of the fundamental courses for the education of values. This study was carried out in order to review the values taught in the 4th grade social science course program, from the vantage point of the teachers. In order to realize this, the achievements in the program were determined and a survey form was created. The study is in a screening model and is descriptive. The study group of the study is composed of 199 classroom teachers working in the province of Elazığ in the academic year of 2016-2017. The data obtained from the research is analyzed using "arithmetic mean" "percentage" and "frequency"; The degree of influence of teacher opinions on variables based on demographic data was also tested using independent t test. According to the results of the research, teachers think that levels of most of the values taught in social sciences course fit the level of understanding of the students. Again, the vast majority of the teachers participated reported that they face a small amount of problems during the teaching of these values to student.


Author(s):  
Charalambos Tsekeris

Sociology and society are undoubtedly on the move. The present concise reflection seeks to comprehensively elaborate on both the social science and the social life within the contemporary dynamical world environment. In this context, brief elaborations are formulated on the complicated issue of technoscientific knowledge and its implications, as well as on a sustainable analytic framework for generating and developing further critical sociological and epistemological considerations about human agency and reflexivity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110202
Author(s):  
Adam Gamoran

Inequality has long been a central focus of sociological research, but some argue that sociology as a discipline has actually done little to reduce inequality in society. This special collection asks whether sociology, and the social sciences generally, have more to offer. Two main articles make the case, the first by exploring the potential of sociology to move from framing inequality to examining responses to inequality and the second by laying out six pathways through which social science research can contribute to inequality reduction. These articles will be followed by a series of commentaries.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Jiménez-Albornoz

This paper develops three basic statements we think are needed for the growth of social science. In the first place, that there is no opposition between society and nature, and that the social sciences study a kind of sociality (entailed on culture and consciousness) that is part of a more general analysis of the social world. In second place, that a universal theory of social processes is possible and it is not in opposition, but actually explains traits of social life usually thought as incompatible with the possibility of a general theory. In third place, that the space in which to build that theory, and one that allows to dissolve some traditional antinomies of social thought, is interaction.


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