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Science of Science and Reflexivity
01 Jan 2004-
TL;DR: Bourdieu's "Science of Science and Reflexivity" as mentioned in this paper argues that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit.
Abstract: Over the last four decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be a thinker on a par with Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan a public intellectual as influential to his generation as Sartre was to his. "Science of Science and Reflexivity" will be welcomed as a companion volume to Bourdieu's now seminal "An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology." In this posthumous work, Bourdieu declares that science is in danger of becoming a handmaiden to biotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, and military research that it risks falling under the control of industrial corporations that seek to exploit it for monopolies and profit. Science thus endangered can become detrimental to mankind. The line between pure and applied science, therefore, must be subjected to intense theoretical scrutiny. Bourdieu's goals in "Science of Science and Reflexivity" are to identify the social conditions in which science develops in order to reclaim its objectivity and to rescue it from relativism and the forces that might exploit it. In the grand tradition of scientific reflections on science, Bourdieu provides a sociological analysis of the discipline as something capable of producing transhistorical truths; he presents an incisive critique of the main currents in the study of science throughout the past half century; and he offers a spirited defense of science against encroaching political and economic forces. A masterful summation of the principles underlying Bourdieu's oeuvre and a memoir of his own scientific journey, "Science of Science and Reflexivity" is a capstone to one of the most important and prodigious careers in the field of sociology."
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed that to penalize the underprivileged and favour the most privileged, the school has only to neglect, in its teaching methods and techniques and its criteria when making academic judgements, to take...
Abstract: … to penalize the underprivileged and favour the most privileged, the school has only to neglect, in its teaching methods and techniques and its criteria when making academic judgements, to take ...
4 citations
Cites methods from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"
...In Bourdieu’s analysis of the scientific field he describes a “series of structural interlockings” (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 32) and that approach could be productively used for mathematics learners in classrooms, in departments, in schools, in local/national school/ employment markets, etc....
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TL;DR: The authors reconstructs the conditions under which Bourdieu came to receive the Gold medal of the National Center for Scientific Research, France's highest science prize, in 1993 as a signal case study of the existential predicament and institutional trappings of scholarly consecration.
Abstract: Drawing on archival materials and personal testimonies, I reconstruct the conditions under which Bourdieu came to receive the Gold medal of the National Center for Scientific Research, France's highest science prize, in 1993 as a signal case study of the existential predicament and institutional trappings of scholarly consecration. Bourdieu's award speech and the ceremony at which he read it present a triple interest for the history and sociology of sociology. They illustrate how a shaping figure in the discipline personally experienced, reflexively viewed, and practically navigated the nexus of science, authority, and power. They mark 1993 as a pivot-year in Bourdieu's intellectual evolution, leading to a new agenda foregrounding the state as paramount symbolic power, the alchemy of group formation, and the unfinished promise of democratic politics; and they help explain why he ventured more forthrightly into civic debate in the 1990s. Bourdieu's ambivalent acceptance of the prize also illustrates his conception of the "Realpolitik of reason" and put an emphatic end to the eclipse of Durkheim by restoring sociology to its rightful place at the scientific zenith in the country of its birth.
4 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the place of gender research and gender studies in universities under the current neo-liberal modes of governance and argue that it is possible to promote a gender science policy that is able to resist and ultimately make a transformative difference in the neo-conservative university.
Abstract: This article will discuss the place of gender research and gender studies in universities under the current neo-liberal modes of governance. Although gender studies has a considerable history within academia and science, gender studies’ contributions in several fields were either kept invisible or just voided. The current neo-liberal rationale has promoted commodification in higher education, individualisation, excessive workloads and performativity in academia. How can these new issues associated with the neo-liberal university be articulated with ‘old’ issues related to gender inequality and to the affirmation of gender studies? Critically analysing the trajectory of science policymaking and the evolution of gender studies in Portugal as well as gender mainstreaming policies implemented in recent years, we argue that it is possible to promote a gender science policy that is able to resist and ultimately make a transformative difference in the neo-liberal university.
4 citations
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: Bourdieu et al. as discussed by the authors show that theoretical political concepts can at the same time be regarded as elements of the everyday political game and of its theoretical study reflect in the empirical observation of their circulation.
Abstract: Concepts that political theory and philosophy have to handle with are Janusfaced, as is the very notion of ‘political thought’. To put it otherwise, their ‘political’ dimension is unclear. Concepts produced by theory or philosophy about the political game are defined as theoretical, i.e. characterized by a rigorously constructed meaning, produced by highly specialized professionals supposed to follow rational procedures and scientific purposes. According to the classical weberian distinction between professional politicians and professional scientists, which still works as a generally accepted norm of modern social sciences, scientific purposes require to display the complete neutrality on which the specific legitimacy of science is grounded. In practice, political theorists and political actors are expected to use different procedures and to pursue different goals. Concepts in use in political theory and everyday politics should therefore be carefully distinguished, as belonging to two autonomous spheres (for an illustration of this position, see BOURDIEU: 2001). However, political concepts do not exactly match these expectations. Being ‘political’ can also refer to the fact that some of them are in use in the games, the vocabulary, the problems which in some way relate to the organization and relations admitted in the city phenomenon once analyzed in terms of “double hermeneutic” by Anthony Giddens (GIDDENS: 1984). That theoretical political concepts can at the same time be regarded as elements of the everyday political game and of its theoretical study reflects in the empirical observation of their circulation. Conceptual circulation refers to the expansion process of the uses of a concept to new debates, process which constitutes the ‘career’ of a concept. This circulation can be geographical, say from Germany to France ; it can be thematic, say from a debate about history to one about democracy ; it can be polemic, say from an academic controversy to a political one. This appears never so strikingly as when theoretical and academic concepts, usually mostly discussed by scholars, abruptly become fashionable in political speeches1, sometimes in the media, be it for just a short or a long length of time. They can be old ones and surface on very specific occasions (for instance, the political debates associated with national sovereignty, human rights,...), or they can be brand new theoretical concepts immediately praised by political actors2 (‘multi-level governance’ for the European Union is the best example: forged in 1994 by a British political scientist, it was made a major issue by the European Commission in a White Book published not later as 2001). Defined this way, political concepts may even play a constitutive role in politics, if we are to agree that “just as certain rules constitute certain
4 citations
01 Sep 2011
4 citations