The paradoxes of practical research: The good intentions of inclusion that exclude and abject:
26 Apr 2020-European Educational Research Journal (SAGE PublicationsSage UK: London, England)-Vol. 19, Iss: 4, pp 271-288
TL;DR: There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change as discussed by the authors, and this desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th century.
Abstract: There is an alluring, daunting, and haunting desire for practical knowledge in the contemporary social and education sciences about school change. This desire is not new: it haunts the turn of 20th...
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01 Jan 2012
643 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigates the often obscured connections between the emergence of Eu ro pean liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eigh tenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Abstract: My study investigates the often obscured connections between the emergence of Eu ro pean liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eigh teenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Cuban Counterpoint (1940), Fernando Ortiz described " peoples from all four quarters of the globe " who labored in the " new world " to produce tobacco and sugar for Eu ro pean consumption. Observing that sugar linked the histories of colonial settlers, native peoples, and slave labor, followed by Chinese and other migrants, Ortiz commented that sugar was " mulatto " from the start. C. L. R. James asserted in The Black Jacobins (1938), that the eighteenth-century slave society in San Domingo connected Eu rope, Africa, and the Americas. He declared that the fortunes created by the slavery-based societies in the Americas gave rise to the French bourgeoi-sie, producing the conditions for the " rights of man " demanded in the Revolution of 1789. 2 These understandings that the " new world " of Eu ro-pean settlers, indigenous peoples, Africans, and Asians in the Americas was intimately related to the rise of liberal modernity are the inspiration for my investigation. 3 Yet I work with the premise that we actually know little about these " intimacies of four continents, " despite separate scholarship about single societies, peoples, or regions. The modern division of knowledge into academic disciplines, focused on discrete areas and objects of interest to the modern national university, has profoundly
434 citations
327 citations
01 Jan 2012
205 citations
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Book•
30 Mar 1991
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the psychology of war and the production of the self in the workplace. But their focus is on the subject of work and not on the individual.
Abstract: Preface. Introduction. PART ONE: PEOPLE AT WAR. 1. The Psychology of War. 2. The Government of Morale 3. The Sykewarriors 4. Groups at War. PART TWO: THE PRODUCTIVE SUBJECT 1. The Subject of Work 2. The Contented Worker 3. The Worker at War 4. Democracy at Work 5.The Expertise of Management 6. The Production of the Self. PART THREE: THE CHILD, THE FAMILY AND THE OUTSIDE WORLD 1. Governing Childhood 2. Normalising Chilren 3. Adjusting the Bonds of Love 4. Maximising the Mind 5. The Responsible Autonomous Family PART FOUR: MANAGING OURSELVES 1. The Therapeutic Imperative 2. Reshaping our Behaviour 3. Obliged to be Free 4. The Psychotherapy of Freedom.
3,939 citations
"The paradoxes of practical research..." refers background in this paper
...The “preparedness” to be actualized through mathematical thinking in work and life is not empirically derived but formed through the application of psychological theories that entail cultural and social principles about modes of life (see, e.g. Danziger, 1997, 2008; Rose, 1989)....
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Book•
18 Aug 2020
TL;DR: Porter as mentioned in this paper argues that the drive for quantitative rigor is not inherent in the activity of science except where political and social pressures force compromise, and that quantification grows from attempts to develop a strategy of impersonality in response to pressures from outside.
Abstract: This investigation of the overwhelming appeal of quantification in the modern world discusses the development of cultural meanings of objectivity over two centuries. How are we to account for the current prestige and power of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is seen as desirable in social and economic investigation as a result of its successes in the study of nature. Theodore Porter is not content with this. Why should the kind of success achieved in the study of stars, molecules, or cells be an attractive model for research on human societies? he asks. And, indeed, how should we understand the pervasiveness of quantification in the sciences of nature? In his view, we should look in the reverse direction: comprehending the attractions of quantification in business, government, and social research will teach us something new about its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Drawing on a wide range of examples from the laboratory and from the worlds of accounting, insurance, cost-benefit analysis, and civil engineering, Porter shows that it is "exactly wrong" to interpret the drive for quantitative rigor as inherent somehow in the activity of science except where political and social pressures force compromise. Instead, quantification grows from attempts to develop a strategy of impersonality in response to pressures from outside. Objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts, quantification becoming most important where elites are weak, where private negotiation is suspect, and where trust is in short supply.
2,630 citations
"The paradoxes of practical research..." refers background in this paper
...The statistical measures of satisfaction, happiness, and well-being are not transcendental characteristics; they are formed through particular historical lines and spaces that become placed into psychological theories about kinds of people (see Desrosières, 1993/1998; Porter, 1995)....
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Book•
01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: The Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender by Judith Butler as mentioned in this paper is an extended study of moral philosophy that is grounded in a new sense of the human subject.
Abstract: What does it mean to lead a moral life?In her first extended study of moral philosophy, Judith Butler offers a provocative outline for a new ethical practice-one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject.Butler takes as her starting point one's ability to answer the questions What have I done?and What ought I to do?She shows that these question can be answered only by asking a prior question, Who is this 'I' who is under an obligation to give an account of itself and to act in certain ways?Because I find that I cannot give an account of myself without accounting for the social conditions under which I emerge, ethical reflection requires a turn to social theory.In three powerfully crafted and lucidly written chapters, Butler demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human. In brilliant dialogue with Adorno, Levinas, Foucault, and other thinkers, she eloquently argues the limits, possibilities, and dangers of contemporary ethical thought.Butler offers a critique of the moral self, arguing that the transparent, rational, and continuous ethical subject is an impossible construct that seeks to deny the specificity of what it is to be human. We can know ourselves only incompletely, and only in relation to a broader social world that has always preceded us and already shaped us in ways we cannot grasp. If inevitably we are partially opaque to ourselves, how can giving an account of ourselves define the ethical act? And doesn't an ethical system that holds us impossibly accountable for full self-knowledge and self-consistency inflict a kind of psychic violence, leading to a culture of self-beratement and cruelty? How does the turn to social theory offer us a chance to understand the specifically social character of our own unknowingness about ourselves?In this invaluable book, by recasting ethics as a project in which being ethical means becoming critical of norms under which we are asked to act, but which we can never fully choose, Butler illuminates what it means for us as fallible creaturesto create and share an ethics of vulnerability, humility, and ethical responsiveness. Judtith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. The most recent of her books are Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence and Undoing Gender.
2,547 citations
"The paradoxes of practical research..." refers background in this paper
...Each is historically “implicated in a set of conditioning moral norms, which, being norms, have a social character that exceeds a purely personal or idiosyncratic meaning” (Butler, 2005: 7–8)....
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...(Butler, 2005: 19) A final note....
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Book•
06 Apr 2010
TL;DR: The Promise of Happiness as mentioned in this paper is a critique of the imperative to be happy, which is defined as the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy.
Abstract: The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.
Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.
2,232 citations
"The paradoxes of practical research..." refers background in this paper
...My use of “affect” is to acknowledge that literature (e.g. Ahmed, 2010; Anderson, 2014) brings new objects of research into view; but at the same time my concern is to think about the relation of ontology and epistemology rather than affect as an object in and of itself....
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...For discussion about the paradoxes of good intentions, see, for example, Ahmed (2010); Ideland (2017) ....
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Book•
01 Jan 1990
TL;DR: Toulmin offers a radically new interpretation of Western intellectual history that humanizes our conception of modernity and reconciles the precision of scientific theory with the reality of human experience as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Toulmin offers a radically new interpretation of Western intellectual history that humanizes our conception of modernity and reconciles the precision of scientific theory with the reality of human experience.
1,425 citations