Download or read book The Self Relational Sociology and Morality in Practice written by Owen Abbott and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Prize Providing a theory of moral practice for a contemporary sociological audience, Owen Abbott shows that morality is a relational practice achieved by people in their everyday lives. He moves beyond old dualisms—society versus the individual, social structure versus agency, body versus mind—to offer a sociologically rigorous and coherent theory of the relational constitution of the self and moral practice, which is both shared and yet enacted from an individualized perspective. In so doing, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice not only offers an urgently needed account of moral practice and its integral role in the emergence of the self, but also examines morality itself within and through social relations and practices. Abbott’s conclusions will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers of morality, those working with pragmatic and interactionist approaches, and those involved with relational sociology and social theory.
Download or read book Where is the Good in the World written by David Henig and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-07-08 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.
Download or read book Methodology of Relational Sociology written by Elżbieta Hałas and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book addressing explicitly and specifically the methodological issues of relational sociology, and more broadly of the new relational paradigm in social sciences. The dynamically developing relational movement in social and cultural sciences is fueled by various classical and contemporary theoretical inspirations. Relational approaches propose various models of relational analyses, such as field analysis, social space analysis, network analysis, or the critical realist relational heuristic. The relational turn, which promotes interdisciplinarity in research, simultaneously reflects the drive towards an innovative reconstruction of sociology. Contemporary relational sociology is at the forefront of the relational movement. The program of relational sociology is still being shaped, frequently becoming the subject of discussions with different standpoints expressed. The aim of this book is to reflect on various relational approaches and models of relational analysis. Answers to two basic questions are sought: Are there foundations for a methodological unity of relational sociology, despite the diversity of approaches? And does relational sociology form a new paradigm? To answer these questions, it is necessary to investigate differences between the relational paradigm and the earlier, competing sociological paradigms. The answers to key questions show what innovations the methodology of relational sociology brings, i.e. what are the methodological consequences of the relational concept of the social fact. The broadly defined horizon of methodological issues is presented. The book creates an open space for discussion on various approaches and varieties of relational analysis, as well as the possibility of their methodological synthesis within relational sociology.
Download or read book Morality in the Making of Sense and Self written by Matthew M. Hollander and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over half a century, Stanley Milgram's classic and controversial obedience experiments have been a touchstone in the social and behavioral sciences, introducing generations of students to the concept of destructive obedience to authority and the Holocaust. In the last decade, the interdisciplinary Milgram renaissance has led to widespread interest in rethinking and challenging the context and nature of his Obedience Experiment. In Morality in the Making of Sense and Self, Matthew M. Hollander and Jason Turowetz offer a new explanation of obedience and defiance in Milgram's lab. Examining one of the largest collections of Milgram's original audiotapes, they scrutinize participant behavior in not only the experiments themselves, but also recordings of the subsequent debriefing interviews in which participants were asked to reflect on their actions. Introducing an original theoretical framework in the sociology of morality, they show that, contrary to traditional understandings of Milgram's experiments that highlight obedience, virtually all subjects, both compliant and defiant, mobilized practices to resist the authority's commands, such that all were obedient and disobedient to varying degrees. As Hollander and Turowetz show, the precise ways subjects worked out a definition of the situation shaped the choices open to them, how they responded to the authority's demands, and ultimately whether they would be classified as "obedient" or "defiant." By illuminating the relationship between concrete moral dilemmas and social interaction, Hollander and Turowetz tell a new, empirically-grounded story about Milgram: one about morality--and immorality--in the making of sense and self.
Download or read book Social Theory written by Mark Murphy and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-22 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook delivers a new thematic introduction to social theory that explores theoretical issues in their contemporary social contexts. Each chapter is devoted to a specific thematic area, including the state, governance, the economy, civil society, culture, language, knowledge, the self, emotions, the body, and social justice. Each chapter details the key issues for debate and the relevant theories while linking those debates and theories to everyday life. Distributed throughout the chapters are focused sections on key concepts and their research applications, alongside helpful additional detail including a glossary, further suggested readings, chapter summaries, and questions for discussion. The book also provides useful information on key theoretical movements such as feminism, Marxism, and post-structuralism, as well as biographies of key theorists. As such, it reflects the breadth of social theory and its interdisciplinary nature by drawing on thinkers not just from sociology, but also from philosophy, history, literature, geography, cultural and gender studies. The book’s logical structure and clear pedagogical features make it an appealing and accessible introductory text for students new to social theory. The chapters demonstrate the relevance of social theory to everyday life, such that readers can understand and actively engage with key concepts.
Download or read book Masking in the Pandemic written by Owen Abbott and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-25 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assumes an “everyday life” perspective towards masking in public spaces in the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic. Facemasks are perhaps one of the most tangible ways in which the changes wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic were made visible. In the space of a few months in 2020, masking in the UK went from being almost non-existent in public to becoming widespread, both before and after the UK government mandated masking in most enclosed public spaces in July 2020. In this context, the speed and scale of the introduction of masking in public settings offers sociologists a rare chance to document the (contested) emergence of a new social practice. We argue that the nature of masking during the pandemic means that masking practices need to be understood through the entwinement of material, interactional, and moral dimensions. We develop a relational perspective to explore the relationship between the materiality and moral significance of masking, and how this translated into the development of masking practices in public spaces. The authors argue further that the specific context of masking during the pandemic provides sociologists with a unique lens to think through the nature of material, interactional, and moral practices in general.
Download or read book Ethics Economy and Social Science written by Balihar Sanghera and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of critical engagements with Andrew Sayer, one of the foremost postdisciplinary thinkers of our times, with responses from Sayer himself. Sayer’s ground-breaking contributions to the fields of geography, political economy and social theory have reshaped the terms of engagement with issues and debates running from the methodology of social science through to the environment, and industrial development to the ethical dimensions of everyday life. Transatlantic scholars across a wide range of fields explore his work across four main areas: critical realism; moral economy; political economy; and relations between social theory, normativity and class. This is the first full-length critical assessment of Sayer’s work. It will be of interest to readers in sociology, economics, political economy, social and political philosophy, ethics, social policy, geography and urban studies, from upper-undergraduate levels upwards.
Download or read book The Political Economy of Heaven and Earth in Ghana written by Charles Prempeh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 2017, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa-Akufu announced his intention to build a national cathedral to the people of Ghana. The announcement elicited watertight counter arguments that morphed into two a priori re-litigated assumptions: First, Ghana is a secular country and second, religion and state formation are incompatible. Informed by a frustrating paradox of an overwhelming religious presence and concurrent pervasive corruption in the country, public conversation reached a cul-de-sac of “conviction without compromising.” In The Political Economy of Heaven and Earth in Ghana, Charles Prempeh deploys the national cathedral as an entry point to provide both interdisciplinary and autoethnographic understanding of religion and politics. The book shows the capacity of religion, when properly cultivated and curated as a worldview to answer the why questions of life, will foster personal, moral, collective and ontological responsibility. All this is needed to stem the tide against corruption, commodity fetishism, environmental degradation (illegal mining—galamsey), heritage destruction and religious exploitation. Prempeh recuperates a historical fact about the mutual inclusivity between religion and politics—politics helping to manage differences, while religion provides a transcendental reason for unity to be forged for human flourishing. Separating the two is, therefore, ahistorical and an obvious threat to the intangible virtues that answers, “why and how” questions for public governance.
Download or read book Criminology as a Moral Science written by Anthony E Bottoms and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes an explicit recognition of criminology as a moral science: a philosophically textured appreciation of the presence and role of values in people's reasoning and motivation, set within an empirically rigorous social-scientific account. This endeavour requires input from both criminologists and philosophers, and careful dialogue between them. Criminology as a Moral Science provides such a dialogue, not least about the so-called 'fact-value distinction', but also about substantive topics such as guilt and shame. The book also provides philosophically-informed accounts of morality in practice in several criminological contexts: these include whistleblowing practices within a police service; the dilemmas of mothers about who and what to tell about a partner's imprisonment; and how persistent offenders begin to try to 'turn their lives around' to desist from crime. The issues raised go to the heart of some currently pressing topics within criminology, notably the development of 'evidence-based practice', which requires some kind of stable bridge to be built between research evidence ('facts') and proposals for policy ('evaluative recommendations').
Download or read book Reintroducing George Herbert Mead written by Daniel R. Huebner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-20 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Herbert Mead has long been known for his social theory of meaning and the ‘self’ - an approach which becomes all the more relevant in light of the ways we develop and represent ourselves online. But recent scholarship has shown that Mead’s pragmatic philosophy can help us understand a much wider range of contemporary issues including how humans and natural environments mutually influence one another, how deliberative democracy can and should work, how thinking is dependent upon the body and on others, and how social changes in the present affect our understandings of the past. Historical scholarship has also changed what we know of Mead’s life, including new emphasis on his social reform efforts, his engagement with colonization and war, and critical reinterpretation of the works published after his death. This book provides an approachable introduction to Mead’s contemporary relevance in the social sciences, showing how a pragmatic view of social action serves as the core of Mead’s theory, offering striking insights into human agency, symbolism, politics, social change, temporality, and materiality. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and the social sciences more broadly, with interests in social theory and the enduring importance of the sociological classics.
Download or read book Donors written by Petra Nordqvist and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-14 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on interviews with donors, their kin and fertility counsellors, the authors discuss what donation stories can tell us about contemporary understandings of connectedness, time and morality in the context of reproduction and family life, and consider how reproductive ‘openness’ might be done differently.
Download or read book What is Essential to Being Human written by Margaret S. Archer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-14 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks whether there exists an essence exclusive to human beings despite their continuous enhancement – a nature that can serve to distinguish humans from artificially intelligent robots, now and in the foreseeable future. Considering what might qualify as such an essence, this volume demonstrates that the abstract question of ‘essentialism’ underpins a range of social issues that are too often considered in isolation and usually justify ‘robophobia’, rather than ‘robophilia’, in terms of morality, social relations and legal rights. Any defence of human exceptionalism requires clarity about what property(ies) ground it and an explanation of why these cannot be envisaged as being acquired (eventually) by AI robots. As such, an examination of the conceptual clarity of human essentialism and the role it plays in our thinking about dignity, citizenship, civil rights and moral worth is undertaken in this volume. What is Essential to Being Human? will appeal to scholars of social theory and philosophy with interests in human nature, ethics and artificial intelligence.
Download or read book Words and Distinctions for the Common Good written by Gabriel Abend and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about it Social scientists do research on a variety of topics—gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in this provocative book, they can’t agree on what these things are and how to identify them. How to tell if something is a religion or a cult or a sect? What is empathy? What makes this society a capitalist one? Disputes of this sort arise again and again in the social sciences. Abend argues that these disagreements have been doubly misconceived. First, they conflate two questions: how a social science community should use its most important words, and what distinctions it should accept and work with. Second, there’s no fact of the matter about either. Instead, they’re practical reason questions for a community, which aim at epistemically and morally good outcomes. Abend calls on social science communities to work together on their words, distinctions, and classifications. They must make collective decisions about the uses of words, the acceptability of distinctions, and the criteria for assessing both. These decisions aren’t up to individual scholars; the community gets the last word. According to Abend, the common good, justice, and equality should play a significant role in the logic of scientific research. Gabriel Abend is professor of sociology at University of Lucerne and the author of The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton).
Download or read book Self Identity and Collective Action written by Francine Tremblay and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on the work of George Herbert Mead, Han Joas, and Axel Honneth, as well as the author’s own personal and academic identities and journeys, Self, Identity, and Collective Action argues that the self and action are strictly related. Reading these authors provided Francine Tremblay with the theoretical ground to stand on while thinking about identity and how it is linked to civic participation. She posits that Mead’s work and its link to action must be revisited and given its rightful place in sociology, and thatsociology must be radical, committed, and passionate.
Download or read book Negotiating Religion and Non religion in Childhood written by Rachael Shillitoe and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-19 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how and if the mandate for children to worship in schools can be justified within the context of declining church attendance and increasing nonreligious identification in British society. Shillitoe asks what place compulsory worship has in an increasingly diverse and plural society, and what the answer means for the relationship between religion, the secular, and education more broadly. Through in-depth ethnographic fieldwork from across three schools in southwest England, the book reveals how examining the significance of children’s experiences expands our understanding of both collective worship in schooling and religion in social life more broadly and demonstrates that adult-centric anxieties and assumptions in this area do not always reflect the experiences of children.
Download or read book Sensory Anthropology written by Kelvin E. Y. Low and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From constructions of rasa (taste) in pre-colonial India and Indonesia, children and sensory discipline within the monastic orders of the Edo period of Japan, to sound expressives among the Semai in Peninsular Malaysia, the sensory soteriology of Tibetan Buddhism, and sensory warscapes of WWII, this book analyses how sensory cultures in Asia frame social order and disorder. Illustrated with a wide range of fascinating examples, it explores key anthropological themes, such as culture and language, food and foodways, morality, transnationalism and violence, and provides granular analyses on sensory relations, sensory pairings, and intersensoriality. By offering rich ethnographic perspectives on inter- and intra-regional sense relations, the book engages with a variety of sensory models, and moves beyond narrower sensory regimes bounded by group, nation or temporality. A pioneering exploration of the senses in and out of Asia, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students in social and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book Terror and the Dynamism of Islamophobia in 21st Century Britain written by Madeline-Sophie Abbas and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-04 with total page 702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides powerful insights into the dynamics, nature, and experiences of the terrors of counter-terrorism measures in the UK. Abbas links her analysis to wider concerns of nation construction and belonging; racial profiling and policing; the state of exception and pre-emptive counter-terrorism measures; community-based counter-terrorism measures; and restrictions to political engagement, freedom of speech and hate speech. What makes this work distinct is its advancement of an original framework - the Concentrationary Gothic - to delineate the racialised mechanisms of terror involved in the governance of Muslim populations in the ‘war on terror’ context. The book illuminates the various ways in which Muslims in Britain experience terror through racialised surveillance and policing strategies operating at state, group (inter- and intra-), and individual levels in diverse contexts such as the street, workplace, public transport and the home. Abbas situates these experiences within wider racial politics and theory, drawing connections to anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-Irishness and whiteness, to provide a complex mapping of the ways in which racial terror has operated in both historical and contemporary contexts of colonialism, slavery, and the camp, and offering a unique point of analysis through the use of Gothic tropes of haunting, monstrosity and abjection. This vital work will be of interest to students and scholars across sociology, criminology, anthropology, terrorism studies, Islamic studies, and critical Muslim studies, researching race and racialisation, security, immigration, nationhood and citizenship.
