Critical theory

About: Critical theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5372 publications have been published within this topic receiving 164765 citations.

Re-Presenting the Good Society

Abstract: Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent of their specific sociocultural context and historical epoch. Today, such a concept of context-transcending validity is not easy to defend; the "linguistic turn" of Western philosophy signals the widespread acceptance of the view that ideas of knowledge and validity are always mediated linguistically and that language is conditioned by history and context. In Re-Presenting the Good Society, Maeve Cooke addresses the justificatory dilemma facing critical social theories: how to maintain an idea of context-transcending validity without violating anti-authoritarian impulses. In doing so she not only clarifies the issues and positions taken by other theorists--including Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler--but also offers her own original and thought-provoking analysis of context-transcending validity.Because the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity is today an integral part of critical social theory, Cooke argues that it should be negotiated rather than eliminated. Her proposal for a concept of context-transcending validity has as its central claim that we should conceive of the good society as re-presented in particular constitutively inadequate representations of it. These re-presentations are, Cooke argues provocatively, regulative ideas that have an imaginary, fictive character.

Evidence‐based practice in educational research: a critical realist critique of systematic review

Abstract: The paper argues that a critical realist perspective can contribute to a critique of evidence‐based practice, while at the same time not abandoning the idea of evidence altogether. The paper is structured around a number of related themes: the sociopolitics of ‘evidence‐based’; epistemological roots and a critical realist critique; the debate in action based on the recent systematic review of personal development planning; and theory to practice gaps. The advocacy of evidence‐based practice is currently being used to undermine professional autonomy and to valorise the ‘gold‐standard’ of randomised controlled trials. However, the paper proposes that evidence can properly be claimed for critique and emancipatory projects, and that its current discursive location at the core of New Labour thinking is not the only one available. Moreover, thinking from a critical realist perspective liberates the space for theoretically informed work, whereby arguments about method, and in particular randomised controlled tri...

These Deadly Times: Reconceptualizing School Violence by Using Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies

Abstract: Most pragmatic responses to school violence seek to assign individual blame and to instill individual responsibility in students. The authors of this article argue that school violence is the result of the structural violence of oppressive social conditions that force students (especially low-income, male African American and Latino students) to feel vulnerable, angry, and resistant to the normative expectations of prison-like school environments. From the vantage point of the intersection of critical race theory and materialist disability studies, the authors examine the impact of social, political, economic, and institutional structures on the social construction of the “deviant” student. They raise questions regarding violent “normalizing” structures and argue for more empowering alternatives.

Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor

Abstract: Coyne examines the entire range of contemporary philosophical thinking-including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology, critical theory, hermeneutics, and deconstruction-comparing them and showing how they differ in their consequences for design and development issues in electronic communications, computer representation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and multimedia. Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age puts the theoretical discussion of computer systems and information technology on a new footing. Shifting the discourse from its usual rationalistic framework, Richard Coyne shows how the conception, development, and application of computer systems is challenged and enhanced by postmodern philosophical thought. He places particular emphasis on the theory of metaphor, showing how it has more to offer than notions of method and models appropriated from science. Coyne examines the entire range of contemporary philosophical thinking-including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology, critical theory, hermeneutics, and deconstruction-comparing them and showing how they differ in their consequences for design and development issues in electronic communications, computer representation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and multimedia. He also probes the claims made of information technology, including its presumptions of control, its so-called radicality, even its ability to make virtual worlds, and shows that many of these claims are poorly founded. Among the writings Coyne visits are works by Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Gadamer, Derrida, Habermas, Rorty, and Foucault. He relates their views to information technology designers and critics such as Herbert Simon, Alan Kay, Terry Winograd, Hubert Dreyfus, and Joseph Weizenbaum. In particular, Coyne draws extensively from the writing of Martin Heidegger, who has presented one of the most radical critiques of technology to date.

Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology

Abstract: Part I: Metatheoretical foundations 1. Classical Foundations 2. Appropriation of the Classical Foundations 3. Contemporary Critical Theory and Pragmatism 4. Immanent Transcendence as Key Concept Part II: Methodology 5. Contemporary Critical Theorists on Methodology 6. The Methodological Framework of Critical Theory 7. Varieties of Critique: Critical Theory Compared 8. Methodology in Action