This article connects J. S. Mill's democratic theory and practice with the contemporary debate surrounding representative constructivism and argues that Mill's advocacy of female suffrage affords an empirical example of the mobilization power of representative constructivism. Studying this concrete example of constructivism alongside Mill's theory of political representation clarifies that constructivism is democratic to the extent it seeks to make citizens themselves appropriate and contest the claims that their representatives construct on their behalf.
This concept paper originates from a bigger documentation, and it attempts to examine the importance of constructivism in building intellectual leaders of characters in Malaysia. It analyses the history and evolution of constructivism. Various theories of learning have been considered but constructivism is imperative as it provides strong theoretical as well as pedagogical links to various methods to teaching and learning. Due to the nature of this paper, it adopts content analysis as its methodological approach. It is found that constructivism offers learning and training principles that suit a military learning environment, referred to by scholars in European countries as military pedagogy. This is because all criteria that are critical for building 'the guardians' of a nation, who must be intellectual leaders of characters, such as meaningful classroom engagement, higher order thinking skills, and collaboration, derive from constructivism. Article DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.20319/pijss.2017.s31.467480 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.
In this dissertation I show that constructivist liberal philosophers are confronted by a dilemma. On the one hand, the conceptions of persons that they appeal to are so thin that contradictory conclusions can be derived from those very same conceptions. Where one philosopher thinks that his or her conception excludes the capitalistic economic liberties from the list of basic rights, it is possible to show with great plausibility the opposite conclusion and vice-versa. The status of the capitalist economic liberties carries significant implications not only for the structure of the economy but also for the place and role of other normative values that more directly affect other areas of life. If it can be shown that a conception of persons leads to contradictory results when it comes to the status of the economic liberties in particular, then the general shape of society will change in significant and inevitable ways as well. In order to avoid this horn of the dilemma, some philosophers seek to thicken their conceptions of persons. In doing so, I maintain that they come to beg too many questions and subsequently undermine whatever normative conclusions they sought to derive from their conception of persons. I analyze this connection within the context of the theories of political philosophers writing from different traditions of liberal thought. To do so I first distinguish between how the concept of personhood has been employed in moral philosophy as opposed to political philosophy. The chapters then move from liberal theories more progressively oriented, such as John Rawls's theory of justice, to more moderate positions, such as John Tomasi's market democracy, to Robert Nozick's libertarianism. In the first two cases I argue that the conceptions of persons employed by Rawls and Tomasi are thin, and that it is possible to show that their conceptions lead to conclusions in conflict with their own stated positions. In the case of libertarianism, I argue that libertarians generally construe self-ownership thickly ...
The presentation details the approaches of a new postgraduate distance learning programme, which includes exploration into the phenomenon of digital events. We explore the rise of online learning in event studies alongside the rise of digital events, mapping the evolving drive for co-creation in events practice with co-creation in participatory learning experiences, both facilitated through social media and activated through networked event co-design. As Events Management and Critical Event Studies come of age, we find ourselves in a new era of critical discourse, in part defined by an expansion from established modes of thinking about events to a more nuanced understanding of them as social, cultural and political phenomena, planned and unplanned, physical and virtual. On the MA Creative Events Management at Falmouth University, our approach is underpinned by a reading of events as societal disruptions (Robinson 2012), which broadens our potential landscape for analysis and delivery (Lamond & Spracklen 2015, Pernecky 2016). Social constructivism informs the instructional design of the programme, developed to feature collaborative elaboration through collectivism and connectivism, with focus placed on social aspects of online learning by engendering communication and cooperation in digital spaces. The programme explores digital events from a range of critical and managerial perspectives, and students in online communities of practice define the parameters, nature and possibilities of, digital events. We suggest that this collective body of thought, arrived at through discussion and digital event design and delivery, exists as a repository of active research, contributing to the nascent literature addressing this newest of phenomena.
The 2016 US Presidential Election has become world' great issue since the politician's speech is mainly concerned with persuading or making the listeners believe with what they are saying. It is a concession speech of Hillary Clinton's that brings out more inspirations to the public than the value of the failure itself. Based on that phenomenon, the researcher was interested in analyzing Hillary Clinton's concession speech by investigating the role of language in communication analysis through speech acts based on the theory of J.L Austin-Searle and genre analysis The researcher decided to raise the constructivism analysis of discourse which analyzes the context behind the languages used in the forms of speech. The results showed that its speech acts types according to its locutionary acts analysis : Declarative (12), Imperative (12), illocutionary acts: Representatives (11), Commisives (3), Directives (9), Declaratives (3), and Expressives (9), and variety of perlocutionary acts (to get people to know, do something, express feeling, and praise). This expository speech mostly characterized by the appreciation and encouragement to the public (a type of speech/discourse which called persuasive-argumentative) and she spoke much about unity to create strong power of America. It has created good arrangement of language that showed Hillary Clinton's power and ideology.
The 2016 US Presidential Election has become world' great issue since the politician's speech is mainly concerned with persuading or making the listeners believe with what they are saying. It is a concession speech of Hillary Clinton's that brings out more inspirations to the public than the value of the failure itself. Based on that phenomenon, the researcher was interested in analyzing Hillary Clinton's concession speech by investigating the role of language in communication analysis through speech acts based on the theory of J.L Austin-Searle and genre analysis The researcher decided to raise the constructivism analysis of discourse which analyzes the context behind the languages used in the forms of speech. The results showed that its speech acts types according to its locutionary acts analysis : Declarative (12), Imperative (12), illocutionary acts: Representatives (11), Commisives (3), Directives (9), Declaratives (3), and Expressives (9), and variety of perlocutionary acts (to get people to know, do something, express feeling, and praise). This expository speech mostly characterized by the appreciation and encouragement to the public (a type of speech/discourse which called persuasive-argumentative) and she spoke much about unity to create strong power of America. It has created good arrangement of language that showed Hillary Clinton's power and ideology.
Social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement, and has been influential in the field of cultural studies. The article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of social constructionism in modern Anglophone historiography and historical epistemology (2000-2015). The research results show the meaning and place of social and cultural constructivism in contemporary Anglo-American theoretical historical reflection. Nowadays constructivism is the theoretical framework for many quantitative researches in history. The authors have discussed constructivism and post-constructivism as "umbrella-approaches" and not as "fully-fledged theories" in modern Anglophone historiography. The presence of theoretical foundations of social constructivism in contemporary Anglophone historiography, its role and level of influence can be accurately described as a "critical inoculation constructivism". To this day the theories of social constructivism perform many reflective and critical functions in cultural history and contemporary Anglo-American historiography. The ideas and postulates of social constructivism continue to play a prominent role in the "democratization" of modern socio-humanitarian knowledge, rethinking ethnicity, gender, socio-cultural identity. The theories of social constructivism are actively used in such historical projects and research directions as gender history, feminism history, sport history, the history of popular culture, media communications, and many others.
This article aims to show how the revelations about the United States of America (US) spying on the European Union (2013) represented an occasion for the latter to reiterate its normative power and the particular importance of the transatlantic partnership. Through observation of "acts of social facts essentialization" by the US and EU and by using a constructivist conceptualization of "agent identity" and "international socialization", the article concludes that the constructivist framework of analysis explains the unfolding of the spying issue. This deductive approach uses the method of discourse and official documents analysis.
One of the major and increasingly more contested discourses on Thai society, politics and culture is that of "Thainess". Thainess is notoriously difficult to define. However, two basic approaches or attitudes to the notion of Thainess can be discerned – primordialism and constructivism. The primordialist vision sees Thainess as an axiomatic given that is ultimately unsusceptible to scientific, rationalist explanation. It is something that is inherent in the "blood" of Thais. It is a set of cultural, social and political beliefs and practices that are intuitively understood, maintained and practiced by all true Thais. By contrast, the constructivist approach, as its name would suggest, sees Thainess as a construction, rather than an essence, and as a discourse that has been used to justify and sustain centralized power and hierarchy in the Thai state. In this paper, I look at a perhaps neglected source of information about Thainess. I analyze constructivist and primordialist visions of Thainess and Thailand in two popular Thai expat crime novels, Christopher G. Moore's The Corruptionist and John Burdett's Bangkok Haunts.
The paper proposes to reconsider the methodology and history of economics radically, whether present day mainstream or heterodox versions of it. The profession of economists must definitely abandon Cartesian dualism and adopt Vygotskian constructivism. In fact constructivist economics already existed in the past and was cognitively very successful and socially very useful. It was the economics of Gustav Schmoller's historico-ethical school and the institutionalist economics of John R. Commons, traditions of which are totally ignored by the contemporary community of economists. The former tradition was based on Dilthey's hermeneutics and the latter on Peirce's pragmatism. It is worth to underline that hermeneutics and pragmatism are both predecessors of Vygotskian constructivism. During the last two decades a lot was written by economists on pragmatist, constructivist and discursive approaches to the methodology and history of economics, but those who wrote on these topics viewed them from the dualistic point of view. My paper is an appeal to economists to reconsider Methodenstreit. The dispute of methods between Schmoller and Menger can be considered as a repetition of a similar dispute taking place more than two hundred years earlier between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. Schmoller-Menger dispute started soon after the beginning of the institutionalisation of experimentally-oriented economics which happened with the creation in 1873 of the Vereinfür Sozialpolitik. Boyle-Hobbes dispute started in 1660, when the Royal Society of London had been founded, the cradle of the institution of science. Schmoller was one of the creators of the Verein, and Boyle was one of the founders of the Royal Society. The activities of both societies were similar in several respects: they represented efforts to collect data, working out of detailed reports and collective evaluation of obtained results. For Hobbes, as for Menger, the model of 'science' was geometry. Boyle and Schmoller privileged collecting and analysing data. Boyle did win the dispute, Schmoller did loose. It happened because of different attitudes of powerful groups in societies towards natural scientific experimental research and experimental social research. They were interested in the former, and they saw much more danger than benefit for them in the latter. On the contrary, they were interested in abstract theoretical constructions justifying the market vision of society and laissez-faire. This kind of constructions corresponded to deeply enrooted scholastic traditions of European universities to teach theology and linked with it philosophy. In the framework of these traditions, mathematics was considered as a summit of the scientific approach. On the one hand, the adoption of constructivism by economists would turn their discipline into a science functionally close to natural sciences. On the other hand the Vygotskian constructivism, as a social and political philosophy, once accepted by economists, may lead them to become preachers of the communitarian liberalism with its emphasis on social responsibility, deliberative democracy, and discourse ethics.
The paper proposes to reconsider the methodology and history of economics radically, whether present day mainstream or heterodox versions of it. The profession of economists must definitely abandon Cartesian dualism and adopt Vygotskian constructivism. In fact constructivist economics already existed in the past and was cognitively very successful and socially very useful. It was the economics of Gustav Schmoller's historico-ethical school and the institutionalist economics of John R. Commons, traditions of which are totally ignored by the contemporary community of economists. The former tradition was based on Dilthey's hermeneutics and the latter on Peirce's pragmatism. It is worth to underline that hermeneutics and pragmatism are both predecessors of Vygotskian constructivism. During the last two decades a lot was written by economists on pragmatist, constructivist and discursive approaches to the methodology and history of economics, but those who wrote on these topics viewed them from the dualistic point of view. My paper is an appeal to economists to reconsider Methodenstreit. The dispute of methods between Schmoller and Menger can be considered as a repetition of a similar dispute taking place more than two hundred years earlier between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. Schmoller-Menger dispute started soon after the beginning of the institutionalisation of experimentally-oriented economics which happened with the creation in 1873 of the Vereinfür Sozialpolitik. Boyle-Hobbes dispute started in 1660, when the Royal Society of London had been founded, the cradle of the institution of science. Schmoller was one of the creators of the Verein, and Boyle was one of the founders of the Royal Society. The activities of both societies were similar in several respects: they represented efforts to collect data, working out of detailed reports and collective evaluation of obtained results. For Hobbes, as for Menger, the model of 'science' was geometry. Boyle and Schmoller privileged collecting and analysing data. Boyle did win the dispute, Schmoller did loose. It happened because of different attitudes of powerful groups in societies towards natural scientific experimental research and experimental social research. They were interested in the former, and they saw much more danger than benefit for them in the latter. On the contrary, they were interested in abstract theoretical constructions justifying the market vision of society and laissez-faire. This kind of constructions corresponded to deeply enrooted scholastic traditions of European universities to teach theology and linked with it philosophy. In the framework of these traditions, mathematics was considered as a summit of the scientific approach. On the one hand, the adoption of constructivism by economists would turn their discipline into a science functionally close to natural sciences. On the other hand the Vygotskian constructivism, as a social and political philosophy, once accepted by economists, may lead them to become preachers of the communitarian liberalism with its emphasis on social responsibility, deliberative democracy, and discourse ethics.
Since the turn of this century, constructivism has dramatically influenced science education and, particularly in Muslim countries, the teaching of evolution. This influence came about gradually. After the 1980's, Muslim graduate students studying Education in Western universities have been taught constructivism both as a theory of learning and a philosophy, more specifically, as an epistemological theory. This has impacted these students' views of the nature of science, scientific argumentation, multiculturalism, and the function of democratic values and practices in education. The scope of this influence raises a number of serious questions: Has constructivism introduced a mode of reasoning into science and science education that is foreign to, and even anathema to, scientific discourse? Why does almost every science education research paper suggest or imply negotiation with clergy and religious NGOs? Such questions are discussed in the present paper. To answer these questions, this paper examines in the context of Enlightenment and secularism theoretical frameworks, the methodologies, and suggestions regarding the teaching of evolution in Muslim countries. ; Since the turn of this century, constructivism has dramatically influenced science education and, particularly in Muslim countries, the teaching of evolution. This influence came about gradually. After the 1980's, Muslim graduate students studying Education in Western universities have been taught constructivism both as a theory of learning and a philosophy, more specifically, as an epistemological theory. This has impacted these students' views of the nature of science, scientific argumentation, multiculturalism, and the function of democratic values and practices in education. The scope of this influence raises a number of serious questions: Has constructivism introduced a mode of reasoning into science and science education that is foreign to, and even anathema to, scientific discourse? Why does almost every science education research paper suggest or imply negotiation with clergy and religious NGOs? Such questions are discussed in the present paper. To answer these questions, this paper examines in the context of Enlightenment and secularism theoretical frameworks, the methodologies, and suggestions regarding the teaching of evolution in Muslim countries.
The author analyzes folk historical and non-academic forms of constructivism as amethod of historical studies in contexts of attempts to use it to study the nationalhistories of Slovenia and Macedonia. The author believes that constructivism as aprivate form of revisionism became an attempt to find new languages of historicalwriting. Constructivism became a marginal method for national histories writingbecause most intellectuals reject it, preferring to use primordial and ethnocentricmodels and languages of history writing. The academic constructivists deconstructthe grand narratives of the preceding historiography and imagine histories asintellectual and cultural constructs. Attempts to write national histories inconstructivist contexts are absent. The nationalist constructivist approaches ethnicisethe ancient history and transplant modern political and ethnic identities.
This article presents an evaluation on Moscow-Washington relations in the context of a renewed antagonism between the two governments, and the foreign policy visions currently employed by the Russian Federation and the United States (in relation to each other) through their compatibility with the Constructivist Theory of IR. We aim to demonstrate that, although the Realist perspective seems (at first glance) the most appropriate one to approach the current foreign policy of both countries (especially on their bilateral relations), ideational factors belonging to the Constructivist Theory still hold sufficient explanatory force in regard to Moscow´s and Washington´s views about each other. In terms of structure, we initially set out to discuss some of the main contributions of Constructivism to IR Theory and its reinterpretation of key-concepts previously crystallized by Neoliberalism/Neorealism. Secondly, we demonstrate how the Constructivist Theory was applied during the Cold War era to explain important events related to the increasing / cooling of tensions between Moscow and the West until the Yeltsin years. Finally, we elaborate on how some of its premises could still be applied today, helping us to fully grasp the current Moscow´s view about the international system and, more importantly, about its complicated relationship with the United States. In methodological terms, the article draws on an analytical (and meta-theoretical) discussion relating the Theory to important events involving both countries politically, deepening the debate on the constructivist vision in IR, while adopting Alexandr Wendt's perspective to substantiate the current argument.Keywords: Constructivism, (Neo)Realism, Russian Foreign Policy, American Foreign Policy, International Relations
