scholarly journals SACRED RIVERS: ENERGY RESOURCES AND PEOPLE’S POWER

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-169
Author(s):  
Susan Visvanathan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Energy Resources ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Technology And Culture ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Good Vision ◽  
The Way

This paper is concerned with the way energy requirements in the last three decades have seen a response from local communities who wish to express their love and longing for traditional occupations. Agriculture is a multi-faceted representation, and riverine civilisations have epitomised the relation between land, labour and production not just as a relation with technology and culture, but also in terms of the symbols of the sacred. With large scale over utilisation of resources and a lack of vision, the rivers are polluted. People’s movements draw on the work of scientists and those working in the Arts, including the Humanities and the Social Sciences to draw attention to the way in which petitions and protests communicate that politics is not merely about imposing ‘the good vision from above’ but is an interplay between the political, the legal, the socio-religious, the secular and the economic. In a democracy, politics is essentially about dialogue, and the rate of industrialisation may well be mediated by the power of the greens and environment movements, which have learnt their lessons from genocide of peasantry and tribals, and the mass exploitation of the resources of nature. The Sociologist attempts to document some of the shifts and evolving positions in this ongoing debate in India.

Mobiles, Mobs, and Monads

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kélina Gotman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Contagion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Body ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
The Way

The emergence of crowd theory in nineteenth-century sociology provided a new language for thinking how unruly bodies gather together organically. Drawing on the first large-scale biohistories of the French Revolution, made possible through documents unveiled at the Archives Nationales, theories of crowds, revolutionary and disordered, animal, automatic and ecological, spawned a genealogy of thinking about the way individuals’ movements were rendered—it was thought—primitive in groups. From the ‘Jerks’ in Kentucky and Tennessee to episodes of falling, starting, ticking, and jumping in hospitals, factories and lumber camps, the ‘social body’ appeared to be teetering out of choreopolitical control. Bacchantic drunkenness, like childlike play, epitomized thoughtless imitation and epidemic enthusiasm according to social scientists and neurologists concerned with the political effects of social contagion. Rapidly proliferating automatic gesture provoked crowds, they wrote, to form and significantly to deform—to disorganize—the political, social, and economic spheres, revealing a demos in disarray.

“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

Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Market Society ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Material ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Leonard Woolf

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.

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.

scholarly journals The Relevance of Inequality Research in Sociology for Inequality Reduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 237802312110201
Author(s):  
Thomas A. DiPrete ◽  
Brittany N. Fox-Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Inequality ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Large Scale Change ◽  
The Subject

Social inequality is a central topic of research in the social sciences. Decades of research have deepened our understanding of the characteristics and causes of social inequality. At the same time, social inequality has markedly increased during the past 40 years, and progress on reducing poverty and improving the life chances of Americans in the bottom half of the distribution has been frustratingly slow. How useful has sociological research been to the task of reducing inequality? The authors analyze the stance taken by sociological research on the subject of reducing inequality. They identify an imbalance in the literature between the discipline’s continual efforts to motivate the plausibility of large-scale change and its lesser efforts to identify feasible strategies of change either through social policy or by enhancing individual and local agency with the potential to cumulate into meaningful progress on inequality reduction.

Microcomputer Simulations of Presidential Elections

1983 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 20-20
Author(s):  
Robert S. Ross
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Science Students ◽  
Instructional Programs ◽  
Santa Barbara ◽  
Large Scale Systems ◽  
The Social ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Machine Interaction

Simulations have been an important adjunct to instructional programs for some time. These have ranged from games, or role playing exercises, such as SIMSOC or Internation Simulation, to student-machine interaction, such as the inter-school simulation run out of University of California, Santa Barbara in the early 70's, to the all machine activities found in some of the early SETUPS. Having social science students use the mainframe computer, however, always posed problems: it definitely was not user-friendly and most instructors had little if any training or interest in the use of large scale systems.The wide-spread use of the micro computer is not only revolutionizing areas traditionally relying upon the computer, but is going to have an impact on the social sciences as well.

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.

Futures Honed

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
Barbara Adam
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
The Past ◽  
Writing Theory ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
The Way

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.

Cognition in a Social Context: A Social-Interactionist Approach to Emergent Phenomena

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 369-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madalina Vlasceanu ◽  
Karalyn Enz ◽  
Alin Coman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Fundamental Characteristic ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Emergent Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Interactionist ◽  
Interactionist Approach

The formation of collective memories, emotions, and beliefs is a fundamental characteristic of human communities. These emergent outcomes are thought to be the result of a dynamical system of communicative interactions among individuals. But despite recent psychological research on collective phenomena, no programmatic framework to explore the processes involved in their formation exists. Here, we propose a social-interactionist approach that bridges cognitive and social psychology to illuminate how microlevel cognitive phenomena give rise to large-scale social outcomes. It involves first establishing the boundary conditions of cognitive phenomena, then investigating how cognition is influenced by the social context in which it is manifested, and finally studying how dyadic-level influences propagate in social networks. This approach has the potential to (a) illuminate the large-scale consequences of well-established cognitive phenomena, (b) lead to interdisciplinary dialogues between psychology and the other social sciences, and (c) be more relevant for public policy than existing approaches.

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.

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