Contemporary society

About: Contemporary society is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3991 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91755 citations.

Racism in Black and White

Abstract: Racism is an elusive, emotional, and historically pervasive fact of American society. In contemporary society, the problems heretofore viewed in the context of a historical legacy that includes involuntary slavery, constitutional denial of equal rights, legal support of second-class citizenship, and ubiquitous and various forms of physical, emotional, social, economic, and psychological exploitation and oppression of black Americans of African descent are now normalized as problems of equal opportunity for minorities. The use of the term minority denotes an expansive confluence of disadvantage associated with being different in any of numerous ways, including physical or mental disability, nonnormative sexual preference, the status of being an immigrant or refugee, aged, chronic poverty, and ethnicity characterized by color. In addition, being female, although not a condition of minority status, does often qualify for being included among the less advantaged.

An Epistemic Frame Analysis of Neoliberal Culture and Politics in the US, UK, and the UAE

Abstract: Neoliberalism is a loosely knit bricolage from economics, politics, and various forms of reactionary populism that can be envisioned as a kind of epistemic frame in which largely counterrevolutionary forces engage in the creative destruction of institutional frameworks and powers, forging divisions across society that include labor and social relations (Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism, 2009). Such “creative destruction” implies that neoliberalism is actually a reactionary “catalog of mind” (Robin, The reactionary mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, 2011, p. 17); that when believers engage in reactions to programs and ideas which represent what Bourdieu (Acts of resistance: Against the tyranny of the market, 1998) called “the left hand of the state” (typically represented by teachers, judges, social workers), one result has been the “involution of the state” (p. 34) and the “destruction of the idea of public service” (Bourdieu, The abdication of the state. In P. Bourdieu (Ed.), The weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society, 1999, p. 182). We examine neoliberalism using Shaffer’s (Int J Learn Media 1(2):1–21, 2009) concept of an “epistemic frame” based on the epistemic frame hypothesis that suggests that a community of practice has a culture, and that the collection of values, skills, knowledge, and identity form the “epistemic frame” (p. 4). An epistemic frame has a kind of grammar and structure comprised of people’s thoughts and actions, reinforced by the ways that people see themselves, the values to which they hold, and the epistemology that binds together their agenda. The purpose of our analysis is to create a praxis for what has been termed Regressionsverbot, which is defined as “a ban on backward movement with respect to social gains at the European level” (Bourdieu, Acts of resistance: Against the tyranny of the market, 1998, p. 41). In the form of cases from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates, neoliberal initiatives are examined, unpacked, and interrogated.

Discipline and deterrence: Rethinking Foucault on the question of power in contemporary society

Abstract: This article considers how Michel Foucault's analysis of disciplinary power might be reformulated and extended to account for significant transformations in the mechanisms of social control in contemporary, postmodern societies. Despite several interesting efforts to apply Foucault's conception of discipline to social control issues in the sociological and criminological literature, such efforts have for the most part misinterpreted his position. This article suggests a more adequate reading of Foucault's conception of discipline as a multipricity of minor coercive techniques which taken together constitute one of multiple schemes for exercising power under given historical social conditions. With regard to the multiple dimensions of power, I shall argue, noting recent criticisms of Foucault's work by Jean Baudrillard, that the exercise of power in contemporary or postmodern societies involves not only mechanisms of discipline, but of deterrence as well.

Triangular relationships between commerce, politics and hip-hop: a study of the role of hip-hop in influencing the socio-economic and political landscape in contemporary society

Abstract: A PhD Thesis to the Anthropology Department, Faculty of Humanities: University of the Witwatersrand.