Introduction: The Promises and Challenges of Crime Ethnographies

This chapter outlines some of the scholarly and political appeals of crime ethnographies and identifies a series of factors that will pose challenges to this methodological approach over the longer term. It briefly charts the early evolution of crime ethnographies, noting how they have expanded to encompass the study of a larger range of criminal or deviant behaviors, while also focusing on the operation of criminal justice institutions. A more diverse group of scholars than was historically the case now conduct such research, individuals who typically embrace a more reflexive orientation to knowledge production than is characteristic of positivist science. Crime ethnographies provide invaluable grounded insights into the lives of participants and processes that are often otherwise hidden or hard to reach. Politically, ethnographies tend to humanize individuals and groups that are easily vilified, while reminding politicians and officials of the need to be conscious of local variability when adopting policy initiatives that originated in different contexts. Notwithstanding the many benefits of this approach, a series of developments now present challenges to crime ethnographies as they are currently practiced, including the changing technological profile of crime, as well as university-based developments, such as changes to the systems for overseeing and rewarding academic work and research ethics protocols that do not accord with the philosophical assumptions of ethnographers or the practical realties of ethnographic fieldwork.

Reflections on an academic life

David Harvey traces his intellectual journey reflecting on what he calls “the central animating theme of his thinking” starting from his days as a positivist geographer and the publication of Explanation. Harvey clarifies that his transition from Explanations to Social Justice, which has often been touted as a radical-epistemological break in his work should actually be seen as a complimentary productive tension. In making this transition, Harvey decided to reject the scientific orthodoxy of positivist science and instead, use dialectics derived from Marx as alternative mode of scientific inquiry. Harvey narrates his Baltimore experience of combatting local racial discrimination as formative in his understandings of the motions of capital and dynamics of uneven development thus imbricating personal politics and Marx's theory of capitalism in his work ever after. Harvey also recalls how teaching of Capital furthered his exploration of the urban condition and accumulation of capital, ultimately leading to the concept of “spatial fix.” Conditions of Postmodernity contends Harvey, taught him the importance of gender and feminist perspective and Justice, Nature written under extreme physical, professional, intellectual duress was intended to bring the “metabolic relation to nature” at the forefront. Economic liberalism propelled Harvey to introspect on his many volumes on the global neoliberal conditions, which he argues is now imbricated with issues of identity and intersectionality involving Black Lives and Me too. Harvey concludes that his intellectual journey has been a preoccupation to understand “contradictory unity between social relations in constant transformation” through Marx's power of abstraction to imagine an “anti-capitalist” future.

Contemporary Grammars of Meaning Creation: Scientific Creationism and New Atheism

This article approaches the grammars of meaning creation by Scientific Creationism and New Atheism from an anthropological-communicological perspective. By grammars of meaning creation, we understand the different languages that the human being uses to communicate the meaning of their existence to themself and others. Nowadays, Scientific Creationism is disseminated around the world and has transcended evangelical Christianity by permeating non-Christian religions. On the other hand, New Atheism, headed by Richard Dawkins, has also reached non-Western cultures such as Muslim cultures. Starting from Apelian transcendental semiotics, the hermeneutics of Durand’s symbol, and Lluís Duch’s anthropological study on mythos and logos, we reflect on the horizons of understanding of both movements. Our study shows that, contrary to what one might think given the antagonistic metaphysical positions the two movements seem to profess, Scientific Creationists and New Atheists share the same grammar of meaning creation: positivism. What one could interpret as a new epistemological controversy between science and religion can be better understood as a fight based on positivist science to establish the true origin myth. Thus, creationists and atheists implicitly recognize positivism as the contemporary theological discourse, i.e., the self-evident grammar of meaning creation that allows the Truth to be expressed.

Periodical amnesia and dédoublement in case-reasoning: Writing psychological cases in late 19th-century France

The psychoanalytical case history was in many ways the pivot point of John Forrester’s reflections on case-based reasoning. Yet the Freudian case is not without its own textual forebears. This article closely analyses texts from two earlier case-writing traditions in order to elucidate some of the negotiations by which the case history as a textual form came to articulate the mode of reasoning that we now call ‘thinking in cases’. It reads Eugène Azam’s 1876 observation of Félida X and her ‘double personality’—the case that brought both Azam and Félida to prominence in late 19th-century French science—against a medico-surgical case penned by the Bordeaux physician in the same decade. While the stylistics of Azam’s medical case mirror its epistemic underpinnings in the ‘vertical’ logics of positivist science, the multiple narratives interwoven in Félida’s case grant both Azam and his patient the role of knowledge-making actors in the text. This narrative transformation chimes with the way Azam reasons ‘horizontally’ from particulars to Félida’s singular condition, but sits in tension with his choice to structure the observation along a ‘vertical’ axis. Between the two, we glimpse the emergence of the psychological observation as a mode of writing and thus of thinking in cases.

Nature-based solutions as discursive tools and contested practices in urban nature’s neoliberalisation processes

‘Nature-based solutions’ is the new jargon used to promote ideas of urban sustainability, which is gaining traction in both academic and policy circles, especially in the European Union. Through an analysis of the definitions and discourse around nature-based solutions, we discern a number of assumptions stemming from positivist science that are embedded in the term, and which we find create an inviting space for nature’s neoliberalisation processes. We provide empirical analysis of how these assumptions realise in two city-initiated projects in Barcelona, Spain, that have been identified as nature-based solutions: the green corridor of Passeig de Sant Joan and the community garden of Espai Germanetes supported under the municipal Pla Buits scheme. Both projects were born in a neoliberal political climate, but their outcomes in terms of neoliberalism and its contestation were very distinct – not least because of the different forms of governance and socio-natural interaction that these two projects foster. Urban nature can serve elite economic players at the expense of widespread socio-ecological benefits. But it can also serve as a ground for the articulation of demands for open and participatory green spaces that go beyond precarious and controlled stewardship for, or market-mediated interactions with, urban nature. We urge for future research and practice on nature-based solutions to be more critical of the term itself, and to guide its instrumentalisation in urban planning away from neoliberal agendas and towards more emancipatory and just socio-ecological futures.

Charles Darwin, Queer Theorist

Darwin conceptualizes nature as a non-normative, infinitely heterogeneous composite of mutating laws and principles. Contextualizing queer literature within a Darwinian framework presents opportunities to reassess contemporary literary histories of modernism that oppose modernist aesthetics, positivist science, and theoretical orthodoxies about the conceptual dangers of nature.

The aesthetics of the religious and the sacralization of “positivist” science – “idealism” (Adam Asnyk) and decadent religious poetry of early modernism (Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski)

Religious images and motives in nineteenth-century poetry (particularly in the period of dominant Positivism) became gradually aestheticized and lost much their original symbolic impact. This was partly due to the consequences of Kantian philosophy that introduce a dichotomy between phenomena and noumena. Positivism was merely interested in the relation between objects belonging to the phenomenal world. Critical theology (D.F. Strauss, Ernest Renan) started to analyze religious symbols and New Testament stories from the point of view of history and (compared) myth, applying positivist methodology to the “humanities”. Poets wishing to recapture the religious potential (the “Holy”) of traditional symbols and ritual had to recontextualize them. The “sacred” does not reside in the symbols themselves, but it is transferred to the relation established by the individual between his position in the world and a symbol or ritual. The religious moment results from experiencing this “unrepeatable” relation (its unrepeatability being the condition of contact with transcendence, relating the symbol as phenomenon with the noumenal sphere that is present as a trace – the individually experienced symbol points to its absence). In Polish late romantic poetry (e.g. Adam Asnyk) the individualization of the experience of transcendence is impeded by the patriotic connotations of religious symbols and rituals that presuppose the experience of belonging to a (“national”) community (a “relic” of Polish romantic messianism, c.f. the aftermath of the January Uprising). The modernist poet Stanisław Korab Brzozowski succeeded in developing a poetic method of recontextualizing traditional religious symbols that allowed to show the incompatibility between the phenomenal and the noumenal sphere as an inner experience of a subject (e.g. a wooden cross stretching its arms to an empty heaven) as a direct reaction to Renan´s relativization of the Christian “Heilsgeschichte”, unmediated by Polish romantic messianism).

An Orientalist Contribution to “Catholic Science”: The Historiography of Andalusi Mysticism and Philosophy in Julián Ribera and Miguel Asín

This article provides a historiographical analysis of the principal works on Andalusi mysticism and philosophy in Spain at the turn of the twentieth century. It portrays the intellectual background in which the Arabist scholars Julián Ribera (1858–1934) and Miguel Asín Palacios (1871–1944) developed their studies, and their particular “presentist” concerns, highlighting how their works and publications on this field cannot be detached from contemporary national debates on religious issues. The contribution of these Orientalist scholars was especially relevant to the transnational movement in defense of a Catholic science. The adherents of this movement sought ways of stressing the compatibility of dogma with the findings of unbiased scientific works, against the perceived attack to religious doctrine they sensed coming from positivist science. The Spanish Orientalists would bring to light the importance of Eastern Christian thought in the development of medieval Muslim theology, therefore vindicating the Christian origins of Andalusi philosophical and theological production and rendering it easier for the Catholic Spanish public to come to terms with Orientalist queries.

Dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: Social science research in the era of positivism and post-truth

The goal of this article is to compare and contrast dialogic analysis versus discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy to address Bakhtin’s quest for “human sciences” and avoid modern traps by positivism and by post-truth. We argue that dialogic analysis belongs to dialogic science, which focuses on studying “the surplus of humanness” (Bakhtin, 1991, p. 37). “The surplus of humanness” is “a leftover” from the biologically, socially, culturally, and psychologically given – the typical and general – in the human nature. It is about the human authorship of the ever-unique meaning-making. Dialogic analysis involves the heart and mind of the researchers who try to reveal and deepen the meanings of the studied phenomena by addressing and replying to diverse research participants, other scholars, and anticipated readers (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019, in press). We argue that dialogic science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “What does something in question mean to diverse people, including the researchers, and why? How do diverse people address and reply to diverse meanings?” In contrast, traditional, positivistic, science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “How things really are? What is evidence for that? How to eliminate any researchers’ subjectivity from the research?” (Matusov, 2019, submitted). Positivist (and monologic) science focuses on revealing patterns of actions, behaviors, and relationships. We argue that in the study of dialogic pedagogy, it is structural and/or functional discourse analysis that focuses on studying the given and objective aspects of dialogic pedagogy. In the paper, we consider, describe, interpret, and dialogically re-analyze a case of dialogic analysis involving science education coming from David Hammer’s and Emily van Zee’s (2006) book. We also discuss structural and functional discourse analysis of two pedagogical cases, a monologic and a dialogic one, provided by David Skidmore (2000). We dialogically re-analyze these two cases and Skidmore’s research. We conclude that in research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond, on social sciences in general) both dialogic science (involving dialogic analysis) and positivist science (involving discourse analysis) are unavoidable and needed, while providing the overall different foci of the research. We discuss the appropriateness and the limitations of discourse analysis as predominantly searching for structural-functional patterns in the classroom discourses. We discuss dialogic tensions in the reported dialogues that cannot be captured by discourse analysis search for patterns. Finally, we discuss two emerging issues among ourselves: 1) whether discourse analysis is always positivist and 2) how these two analytic approaches complement each other while doing research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond).

Racionalidade Ambiental: possibilidades para a Educação Profissional Environmental Rationality: possibilities for Professional EducationRacionalidad Ambiental: posibilidades para la Educación Profesional

O texto ressalta as contribuições da Racionalidade Ambiental para a Educação Profissional pautada na ética e na horizontalidade de saberes. A Racionalidade Ambiental torna-se necessária diante da crise ambiental baseada na apropriação da natureza, na ciência positivista, no pensamento colonizador, na fragmentação do conhecimento e nos meios de produção capitalista que causaram e ainda causam uma crise civilizatória. Apresentamos uma revisão bibliográfica acompanhada de um horizonte epistemológico de compreensão Hermenêutica, preocupada com as contribuições dos Fundamentos da Educação Ambiental para a Educação Profissional. Concluímos que se faz necessário que a Racionalidade Ambiental seja vivenciada nas Instituições de Ensino e que possam significar tais conceitos no processo educativo. The text highlights the contributions of Environmental Rationality to Professional Education based on ethics and the horizontality of knowledge. Environmental Rationality becomes necessary in the face of the environmental crisis based on the appropriation of nature, positivist science, colonizing thought, the fragmentation of knowledge and the capitalist means of production that have caused and still cause a crisis of civilization. We present a bibliographical review accompanied by an epistemological horizon of understanding Hermeneutics, concerned with the contributions of the Fundamentals of Environmental Education for Vocational Education. We conclude that it is necessary that Environmental Rationality be experienced in the Institutions of Education and that can mean such concepts in the educational process. El texto resalta las contribuciones de la Racionalidad Ambiental para la Educación Profesional pautada en la ética y en la horizontalidad de saberes. La racionalidad ambiental se torna necesaria ante la crisis ambiental basada en la apropiación de la naturaleza, en la ciencia positivista, en el pensamiento colonizador, en la fragmentación del conocimiento y en los medios de producción capitalista que causaron y aún causan una crisis civilizatoria. Presentamos una revisión bibliográfica acompañada de un horizonte epistemológico de comprensión Hermenéutica, preocupada por las contribuciones de los Fundamentos de la Educación Ambiental para la Educación Profesional. Concluimos que se hace necesario que la Racionalidad Ambiental sea vivenciada en las Instituciones de Enseñanza y que puedan significar tales conceptos en el proceso educativo.