Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

We Have Never Been Modern

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Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method is a systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. It brings together three central approaches, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, in order to establish a dialogue between different forms of discourse analysis often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries. The book introduces the three approaches in a clear and easily comprehensible manner, explaining the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach as well as the methodological guidelines and tools they provide for empirical discourse analysis. The authors also demonstrate the possibilities for combining different discourse analytical and non-discourse analytical approaches in empirical study. Finally, they contextualize discourse analysis within the social constructionist debate about critical social research, rejecting the view that a critical stance is incompatible with social constructionist premises and arguing that critique must be an inherent part of social research.

/pdf/discourse-analysis-as-theory-and-method-4envkcrccs.pdf

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method

http://ivl.cns.iu.edu/km/pres/2009-zoss-links/2009-zoss-links-research-design/references/borgattifoster.pdf

The Network Paradigm in Organizational Research: A Review and Typology

Le problème de la signification au cinéma

OCTOBER 112, Spring 2005, pp. 3–22. © 2005 Columbia University Press. As Barthes had promised in the lecture with which he inaugurated his assumption of the Chair of Literary Semiology at the College de France, he would pursue a “phantasmic teaching,” one based on the “comings and goings of desire, which [the teacher] endlessly presents and represents. I sincerely believe,” he continued, “that at the origins of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy, which can vary from year to year.”1 But the fantasy on which Barthes’s penultimate course, “Le Neutre,” is based did not “vary from year to year”; it held steady, rather, over the trajectory that took him from Writing Degree Zero with the zero degree an early version of le neutre, through all the rest of his books. Perhaps its most touching statement is to be found in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, where Barthes traces his mature commitment to this domain back to the impulses of his early childhood, so that even while playing a version of tag in the Luxembourg Gardens, his inclination was to neutralize the exercise of power which rules an opponent “out”:

Roland Barthes

Papers

Le problème de la signification au cinéma

From The Neutral: Session of March 11, 1978

Variaciones sobre la literatura

La lumière du Sud-Ouest

La préparation du roman, I et II : notes de cours et de séminaires au Collège de France 1978-1979 et 1979-1980