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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."
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors used a mix of four common social research methods (interviews, participant observation, questionnaires and content analysis) combined with practice theory to understand the environmental, social and economic sustainability practices of backpackers.

11 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Despite its post-Soviet history, Azerbaijan is an under-investigated country in academic research as mentioned in this paper, compared with the other former constituencies of the former USSR, such as the Baltic countries or Russia, of the USSR.
Abstract: Despite its post-Soviet history, Azerbaijan is an under-investigated country in academic research—compared with the other former constituencies, such as the Baltic countries or Russia, of the USSR— ...

11 citations


Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

  • ...This perspective is helpful in mapping out the different actors in Azerbaijani field of gendered politics, and enables one to acquire “an instrument for forecasting the probable behaviors of agents occupying different positions within that distribution” ([7], p....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Reflexivity refers to the attention paid to engaging with one's own experience and the noticing of one's sometimes unsettling movement of thought over an extended period of time and by doing so how this in turn affects one’s own practice with others as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Research into senior groups and their political nature has serious gaps. We claim that participants in the process are best placed to be both researchers and, with others, the subject of research. Here we illustrate the shortcomings of current methodologies, such as action research, due to the spatial separation and detemporalisation between what is being researched and the construction of a research interpretation. We highlight a tendency to veer towards the intellectual post hoc interpretation of events at the expense of the visceral nature of immersed human experience. Reflexivity in this paper refers to the attention paid to engaging with one’s own experience and the noticing of one’s sometimes unsettling movement of thought over an extended period of time and by doing so how this in turn affects one’s own practice with others. We give examples of and argue for reflexive practice which understands and overcomes its own immersed nature.

11 citations


Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

  • ...…that they apply to the other sciences, sociologists have to convert reflexivity into a disposition constitutive of their scientific habitus . . . (Bourdieu 2004, 89) But sociologists must first avoid the temptation of indulging in the type of reflexivity that could be called narcissistic, not…...

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  • ...(Bourdieu 2004, 91) Making this distinction in no way depreciates what a practitioner’s reflection-inaction, or retrospectively alone, or with peers, or with others such as customers or complete outsiders, can accomplish: it argues for what reflexivity as a shared discipline can distinctively…...

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  • ...(Bourdieu 2004, 89) To this one should add, to complete the marking of the difference from narcissistic reflexivity, that reformist reflexivity is not something done by one person alone and that it can exert its full effect only if it is incumbent upon all the agents engaged in the field....

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Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: In this article, a conceptual chapter explores teacher's past experiences, and resulting habitus, to explain the minimal extent of problem-based learning in K-12 schools, and Implications for teacher education and teacher change are discussed.
Abstract: Despite evidence that it can help students learn higher-order thinking skills and gain deep content knowledge, problem-based learning (PBL) is not deployed on a large scale in K-12 classrooms. This conceptual chapter explores teacher’s past experiences, and resulting habitus, to explain the minimal extent of PBL in K-12 schools. Central to teachers’ abilities to implement PBL is their ability to provide scaffolding, and their habitus may interfere with this process. Implications for teacher education and teacher change are discussed.

11 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the attitudes of male and female students in the University Department of Primary Education (U.D.P.E.) at the University of Patras in Greece, before the enforcement of the IMF Memorandum, concerning the choice of the teaching profession and the corresponding scientific field of studies.
Abstract: The purpose of this research paper is the investigation of , and the sociological approach to, and interpretation of the attitudes of male and female students in the University Department of Primary Education (U.D.P.E.) at the University of Patras in Greece, before the enforcement of the IMF Memorandum, concerning the choice of the teaching profession and the corresponding scientific field of studies. In particular, we will be concerned with the following research questions: a) what are the attitudes of male and female students regarding the reasons for the choice of the particular scientific field and b) What is the influence of the gender of the male and female students of the U.D.P.E. at the University of Patras as far as the choice of studies in the particular scientific field is concerned. The most significant findings of the work reveal that in the particular University Department female students are overrepresented in percentage terms, a fact which demonstrates the ‘feminizing’ of the Department in question. It also became apparent that the educational and professional choice of the female students in the particular University department is guided by their gender, which directs their practice. Finally, the prospect of immediate and certain professional employment which studies in the field of teaching in Greece promised, before the appearance of the economic crisis and the enforcement of the austerity measures, emerged as the most significant factor in the choice of the teaching profession by both sexes.

11 citations


Cites background from "Science of Science and Reflexivity"

  • ...…which is founded on the validation of male domination, and functions in relation to women through the subtle exercise of ‘symbolic violence’ so that they themselves confirm that by their nature they are destined for specific work, such as for example the teaching profession (Bourdieu, 2007b:74)....

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  • ...Gender differentiation is found only in the fact that the female students use the concept of vocation as ‘social contribution and help’, expressing once again the ‘power of the construct’ in the division of labour (Bourdieu, 2007:184)....

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  • ...Besides, as Bourdieu characteristically mentions, women are expected to be ‘feminine and full of caring’ (Bourdieu, 2007b:129)....

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  • ...This choice is the result of the harmonious meeting of the dispositions which they have incorporated and the positions which these occupy within the specific field each time such as, in this case, the educational field (Bourdieu, 2007b: 115-116)....

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  • ...Besides, a job’s status is differentiated depending on whether the job is performed by men or women and each job is ‘conceived’ of differently based on the gender division of its performance (Maruani & Nicle, 1989:15; Bourdieu, 2007b:120)....

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