Suchergebnisse

Representing the human body science as social meaning adopts and develops systemic functional social semiotics to analyse the popular science texts, The Human Body, Superhuman, Human Instinct, Brain Story, The Secret Life of Twins and How to Build a Human. These are predominantly produced through the resources of the Wellcome Trust and/or the BBC/TLC (The Learning Channel), and feature celebrity doctors (Robert Winston) or scientists (Susan Greenfield) as presenters. Adopting a modified and expanded systemic functional semiotics derived from Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001), it is argued that these texts share a logic that displaces social/historical time (including broader historical and social struggles) by constructing the apparent timelessness of middle-class families, by metaphor and abstraction. Central to the temporalities of these programmes is the notion of going back to the familial in which conscious (patriarchal) time is seen as male and the unconscious timeless is seen as female . Second, the penetrative digital modes of the programmes imagine different, if conventional, genders, emphasising the interior and inertial female. The popular medical science discourses highlighted in the analysis constitute an unconscious set of taken-for-granted socio-political contexts in which medical and bioscientific knowledge is paraded and celebrated. Narrative resolution of the contradictions inherent in the contextual refrain of contemporary global capitalism is largely achieved through time by the semiotic realisation of going back to evolutionary, genetic, and (hence to) essential time and to abstracted spatial metaphors. The production origins (British, multi-national) of the factual science documentary prefigure or pre-structure the genre s conservative colonising discourse around gender, race and evolution that are developed as social, political or even military metaphors.

AbstractThe development of urban studies during the 1960s and 1970s was an offshoot of mainstream social sciences which, at least in Latin America, were formulated from a critical standpoint based largely on a renovated Marxism and the rise of the structuralisms. Now that this framework's apparently solid base has come under question in the so‐called 'paradigm crisis', what is the outlook for urban studies and, in general, for the critical social sciences? This article poses a series of ideas which hopefully will contribute to a discussion on these and other aspects of a theoretical debate which cannot be ignored by urban researchers.

AbstractThis article weaves social science discourse into the fabric of a genealogy of terrorism. The power struggles associated with the US lead global war on terrorism are producing many new objects of knowledge and possible lines of research (e.g., Islamic terrorists, jihadists, suicide bombers, experts on counterterrorism, and ISIS). This process is modeled as a cycle involving power struggles and power elite orchestrated political victimage rituals and a biopolitics of knowledge. This dynamic is explored in terms of social science discourse and the biopolitics of terrorism. The limits of current thinking in "counterterrorism" and the possibilities of future research are highlighted.

The interventionist theory of causation has been advertised as an empirically informed and more nuanced approach to causality than the competing theories. However, previous literature has not yet analyzed the regression discontinuity (hereafter, RD) and the difference-in-differences (hereafter, DD) within an interventionist framework. In this paper, I point out several drawbacks of using the interventionist methodology for justifying the DD and RD designs. Nevertheless, I argue that the first step toward enhancing our understanding of the DD and RD designs from an interventionist perspective is to take advantage of the assumptions of common trend and continuity.

With comments by Rémy Leveau. Summary in English. Focuses on epistemological, ethical, and legal aspects.

As part of a special journal forum entitled "Swiss Political Sciences Review." The aim of this paper is to discuss Tilly's intellectual itinerary in which social transactions and narratives became more central in his theoretical framework. The author discusses this itinerary by narrowing his empirical focus to Tilly's work on contention. As large-scale processes, first, the author presents a genealogy of Tilly's definition of social movements. Second, the author examines his reformulation of contentious repertoire. Third, the author discusses the importance of his theoretical thinking for a better understanding of small-scale processes such as people joining collective action. Finally, the author concludes the paper with a few implications of Tilly's theoretical framework for social scientists. Kenneth Ngo

Fil: Derghougassian, Khatchik. Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina. ; Paper presentado en el encuentro del Society for Armenian Studies en ocasión de un congreso especial por el 35° aniversario de su fundación en UCLA en marzo de 2009. ; March 1, 2008 seemed to mark a turning point in Armenian politics. The violent protest against the widely claimed fraud during the February 19, 2008 presidential elections by the followers of the former President Levon Ter Petrosian, the main contender against the official winner of the ballot, ex-PM Serge Sargsyan, met with even harsher repression by the police forces resulting to the death of 10 people and the arrest of more than a hundred others. The event highlighted a deep political polarization in Armenian society that seemed the consequence of the decision of Ter Petrosian to emerge from his decade-long silence and run as a presidential candidate. Regardless of the reasons behind this decision, what raises interest, however, is his capacity to convince and mobilize 21% of the voters according to the official figures of the elections. This paper takes a critical look into the deep causes of the political polarization in Armenia, which, as the argument goes, reflects a distorted social protest. I expand Albert Hirschman's concept of "voice, exit and loyalty" to explain the anger vote, and highlight the structural and political reasons for the lack of any credible proposal for change that addresses society's real demands for social justice.

Data and Social Science Rhetoric: Policy and Instruction