Download or read book The Social in Question written by Patrick Joyce and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their uncertainty has taken on many guises and the social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together.Drawn form sociology, cultural studies, history and theology, an international and eminent cast of contributors look at how the idea of 'the social' developed from its mediaeval foundations to its consolidation in the early twentieth century. The book then charts how the concept has been brought into the question by critiques from science studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies before going on to look at how new framework are being proposed for the exploration of issues formerly seen as 'the social'. This book makes a fascinating contribution to the rethinking of contemporary academic activity.
Download or read book The Social in Question written by Patrick Joyce and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of 'the social'. Thinkers form across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this one foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their uncertainty has taken on many guises and the social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together.Drawn form sociology, cultural studies, history and theology, an international and eminent cast of contributors look at how the idea of 'the social' developed from its mediaeval foundations to its consolidation in the early twentieth century. The book then charts how the concept has been brought into the question by critiques from science studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies before going on to look at how new framework are being proposed for the exploration of issues formerly seen as 'the social'. This book makes a fascinating contribution to the rethinking of contemporary academic activity.
Download or read book The Social in Question written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Empires of the Imagination written by Holger Hoock and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2010-07-09 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, Britain evolved from a substantial international power yet relative artistic backwater into a global superpower and a leading cultural force in Europe. In this original and wide-ranging book, Hoock illuminates the manifold ways in which the culture of power and the power of culture were interwoven in this period of dramatic change. Britons invested artistic and imaginative effort to come to terms with the loss of the American colonies; to sustain the generation-long fight against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; and to assert and legitimate their growing empire in India. Demonstrating how Britain fought international culture wars over prize antiquities from the Mediterranean and Near East, the book explores how Britons appropriated ancient cultures from the Mediterranean, the Near East, and India, and casts a fresh eye on iconic objects such as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles.
Download or read book The Social After Gabriel Tarde written by Matei Candea and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social sciences and humanities are now being swept by a Tardean revival, a rediscovery and reappraisal of the work of this truly unique thinker, for whom ‘everything is a society and every science a sociology’. Tarde is being brought forward as the misrecognised forerunner of a post-Durkheimian era. Reclaimed from a century of near-oblivion, his sociology has been linked to Foucaultian microphysics of power, to Deleuze's philosophy of difference, and most recently to the spectrum of approaches related to Actor Network Theory. In this connection, Bruno Latour hailed Tarde’s sociology as "an alternative beginning for an alternative social science". This volume asks what such an alternative social science might look like.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Self written by Shaun Gallagher and published by OUP UK. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 759 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Self explores a fascinating diversity of questions about our understanding of self from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, neuroscience, psychopathology, narrative, and postmodern theories.
Download or read book Visions of the Social written by Jean Terrier and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essentially contested notion, society is viewed by some as the most important level of human reality, while others deny its existence outright. Taking the example of France between the Enlightenment and the Second World War, this book recounts the debates among thinkers and scholars on the nature of the social. By way of an original analysis of the work of many key figures in the history of French thought, the author convincingly demonstrates the strength of the connection between social theories and political projects. He pays particular attention to conceptual and terminological developments, thereby shedding a new light on the history of some core concepts of the human sciences, such as "society", "culture", and "civilisation".
Download or read book Undisciplining Knowledge written by Harvey J. Graff and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-08 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars across the disciplines, specialists in higher education, administrators, and interested readers will find the book's multiple perspectives and practical advice on building and operating--and avoiding fallacies and errors--in interdisciplinary research and education invaluable.--Michael Bevis, The Ohio State University, School of Earth Sciences "The Quarterly Review of Biology"
Download or read book Logics of History written by William H. Sewell Jr. and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-08 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
Download or read book Social Theory written by Carsten Bagge Laustsen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook offers a new approach to understanding social theory. Framed around paired theoretical perspectives on a series of sociological problems, the book shows how distinctive viewpoints shed light on different facets of social phenomena. The book includes sociology’s "founding fathers", major 20th-century thinkers and recent voices such as Butler and Zizek. Philosophically grounded and focused on interpretation and analysis, the book provides a clear understanding of theory’s scope while developing students’ skills in evaluating, applying and comparing theories.
Download or read book The Occasions of Community written by Timothy D. Harfield and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Society did not always exist. The emergence of disciplinary sociology in the nineteenth century was made possible because of a rethinking of society. With modernity, society suddenly became a thing that acted upon reality in a way that could be understood separately from the individual and the state. Although our modern conception of society is most commonly attributed to Montesquieu, many have suggested that it was actually an Italian thinker named Giambattista Vico who first made the discovery. How else could Vico found a 'sociology' one hundred and fifty years before the term was coined by Auguste Comte? In spite of Vico's reputation as an important proto-sociologist, however, there has never been a systematic study of the concept of society as it appears in his work. In The Occasions of Community, Timothy D. Harfield explores several questions about the nature of society with important consequences for the history of the social sciences. What were the conditions that made it possible for our modern idea of society to emerge? What was it about the modern view of society that made the discipline of sociology possible? Is Vico's masterwork, The New Science, rightly praised as an important work of early sociology? Or does Vico's interest in the work of divine providence betray the fact that, for all Vico's brilliance as a thinker, The New Science was not yet modern?
Download or read book Writing History in the Age of Biomedicine written by Roger Cooter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV A collection of ten essays paired with substantial prefaces, this book chronicles and contextualizes Roger Cooter’s contributions to the history of medicine. Through an analysis of his own work, Cooter critically examines the politics of conceptual and methodological shifts in historiography. In particular, he examines the “double bind” of postmodernism and biological or neurological modeling that, together, threaten academic history. To counteract this trend, suggests Cooter, historians must begin actively locating themselves in the problems they consider. The essays and commentaries constitute a kind of contour map of history’s recent trends and trajectories—its points of passage to the present—and lead both to a critical account of the discipline’s historiography and to an examination of the role of intellectual frameworks and epistemic virtues in the writing of history. /div
Download or read book Rethinking Modernity written by G. Bhambra and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-04-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing for the idea of connected histories, Bhambra presents a fundamental reconstruction of the idea of modernity in contemporary sociology. She criticizes the abstraction of European modernity from its colonial context and the way non-Western "others" are disregarded. It aims to establish a dialogue in which "others" can speak and be heard.
Download or read book Simmel and the Social written by O. Pyyhtinen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-17 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for the centrality of Georg Simmel's social theory to the relational and processual emphases that are often considered as much more recent developments in social theory. Situating Simmel's work in particular with respect to New Vitalism and Bruno Latour's work, the book shows that Simmel has still an enormous amount to contribute.
Download or read book Sociological Knowledge and Collective Identity written by Stavit Sinai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-28 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sociology, emerging in the 19th century as the study of national societies, is the intellectual product of its time, power relations and social imaginaries. As a discursive practice that was enmeshed in the meta-narratives of modernity, the discipline of sociology bears the inherent capacity to shape socially shared concepts and construct collective identities. This book examines the relationships between sociology and projects of national identity construction, and presents a critique of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, the prominent Israeli sociologist known as the "father of Israeli sociology". The book focuses on Eisenstadt’s sociology of Israel as a case of knowledge construction within an ideological system and examines the relationships between his various sociological analyses of Israeli society and the Zionist imaginary, namely the deeply entrenched political myths and historiographical narratives that constitute Israel’s hegemonic national identity. By emphasizing the interrelation between textuality, identity, and loaded language, the volume seeks to demythologize Eisenstadt’s sociology of Israel. Three major concepts in Eisenstadt’s scholarship are specifically thematized: integration, civilization, and modernities. In each of these foci, the author shows how Eisenstadt’s sociological conjectures reproduce dominant Zionist historiographical representations of the past, rationalize prevalent social hierarchies, reify the boundaries of a national collective "Self", and render legitimacy to Israel’s governing ethnocratic tendencies, underlying the premises of the Zionist settler-colonial project. Sociological Knowledge and Collective Identity will appeal to those interested in the interconnectedness of sociology and political memory, as well as in a radical postcolonial reconstruction of sociology.
Download or read book Reassembling the Social written by Bruno Latour and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-06 with total page 813 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology written by François Dépelteau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-10 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook on relational sociology covers a rapidly growing approach in the social sciences—one which is connected to the interests of a large, diverse pool of researchers across a range of disciplines. Relational sociology has been one of the key foundations of the “relational turn” in human sciences since the 1980s, and it offers a unique opportunity to redefine the basic epistemological and ontological principles of sociology as we know it. The contributors collected here aim to elucidate the complexity and the scope of this growing approach by dealing with three central questions: Where does relational sociology come from and what are its principal concerns? What are the main theoretical and methodological currents within relational sociology? What have we studied in relational sociology and what are the results?
