Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half-Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction -- Part I Historical Context -- 1 Chomsky and Religion -- 2 Noam Chomsky and the Anarchist Tradition -- Part II Key Works -- 3 Human Nature and Universal Moral Grammar -- 4 The Propaganda Model: Still Relevant Today? -- Part III Themes and Debates -- 5 Method, Methodology, and Politics -- 6 Chomsky versus Pinker on Human Nature and Politics -- Part IV Contemporary Relevance -- 7 How Useful Is a Propaganda Model for Screen Entertainment?

One of few serious academic studies of Chomsky's political writing, this volume addresses many key issues in political theory through an engagement with Chomsky's ideas. Subjects covered include equality and freedom, politics and the media.

A number of authors have identified Chomsky's work as belonging within the critical realist tradition (Wilkin 1997; Edgley 2000; Laffey 2003). In chapter five, Alison Edgley explores some of the epistemological assumptions of critical realism, in order to highlight his distinctive and nuanced approach to social scientific study and examine the ways in which Chomsky could be said to be operationalizing this approach. She identifies three methods typically employed by Chomsky that, when employed rigorously, enable the alert social scientist to the possibility and nature of contradictions between policy rhetoric and policy outcomes. Chomsky, as is typical of a critical realist in action, seeks to identify both necessity and possibility or potential in the world by asking what things must go together, and what could happen, given the nature of those objects. His writings show how critical realist analysis can successfully be deployed across the publications, pronouncements and actions of policy-makers, academics, civil servants, journalists and opinion-formers to produce an exemplar of robust and revealing foreign policy analysis, For these reasons, it can be argued that critical realism provides a compelling philosophical underpinning for doing social science research in general, and for Chomsky's research on American foreign policy in particular.

Chomsky's critique of US foreign policy – and the media coverage it generates – has significant theoretical merit, and deserves to be of considerable interest within the social sciences. His analysis rests upon two distinctive positions. First, he claims that capitalism only survives because of the role played by the state, legislatively and administratively, controversially adding that it operates as an economic agent providing welfare for the rich. While the political and corporate elite can have varied and at times conflicting interests, the so-called common interest, operationalized via the state, excludes the mass of ordinary people from existing power and economic relations. Second, Chomsky's analysis of the state is supported by an admittedly unverifiable view of an essentialist human nature. For Chomsky, humans are creative and capable of 'abduction'. This leads him to argue for conditions of freedom, not so that humans are free to be atomistic individuals, but to allow an interdependent and creative mutuality to flourish. Ironically, the marginalization of Chomsky by social scientists and intellectual elites, especially in the US, has resulted in their own assumptions remaining unchallenged and unexamined.

Chomsky's work focuses its uncompromising gaze upon the American state. He exposes the self-interested, and for the privileged few, the powerful and often brutal nature of a state's international relations. The internal and external roles of states can be seen to be intimately linked. This paper argues that to define a state by considering only its internal relations is to misrepresent it. If we give equal attention to the international dimensions of a state's actions then distinctions between democratic and fascist states become blurred. It is also possible to challenge the Marxist assumption that a state only becomes 'Bonapartist' during an interregnum.

Employing a material discursive approach, this article deconstructs advice within published guides to pregnancy and birth written by men for men. We deconstruct the representation of feelings and emotions in men during this period rejecting essentialist and social constructionist views of gendered emotionality. We find the texts are saturated with emotional advice, which is ambivalent and resorts to forms of essentialism that obscure male vulnerabilities and leave male forms of power intact. While men can expect to feel love, fear, and disgust, the case for male calm and stoicism is reconstructed, threatening dire consequences if he fails. Our study makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the affective assemblage that accompanies men who are now expected to care during pregnancy, labor, and birth. Men are constructed as having an embodied experience that cannot be admitted to, ensuring that hegemonic masculine understandings reinforce gendered constructions of care, caring and emotions during pregnancy, labor and birth.

This manuscript aims to embed a researcher's reflexive account within a qualitative interview in an iterative process whereby a self-analytic reflexive exercise was conducted prior to, during the interview, and within the analysis of the interview. This interview was conducted between an overseas PhD student as an interviewer and a native PhD student as interviewee. The researcher's (interviewer) demonstration of learning about herself is of particular importance in this piece of work. Having the chance to conduct this interview between an overseas PhD student and a native student provided insights about the stereotypes implanted within the researcher which meant that she assumed that a PhD is more stressful for overseas than for home students.