Showing papers on "Realism published in 2019"

Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963

Abstract: Hugely impressive in its scope, with introductory chapters on social history, the film industry and theories of realism, this indispensable history of these vital years contains unusually fresh discussions of films justly regards as important, alongside those unjustly ignored. The extensive filmography which accompanies Sex, Class and Realism will also prove to be an invaluable reference source in the teaching of British cinema history.

Critical realism in empirical research: employing techniques from grounded theory methodology

Abstract: Whilst critical realism (CR) is becoming recognised as a significant meta-theory for the social sciences, there is little guidance on how to produce research which is consistent with its ontologica...

The Great Delusion: liberal dreams and international realities

Abstract: In the The Great Delusion, John Mearsheimer takes on the big game and effectively provides two books in one. The first is a study of the relationship between the three isms – liberalism, realism, a...

Being Realistic and Demanding the Impossible

Abstract: Characterising realism by contrasting it with moralism leaves open several questions to do with realism’s practical import. If political judgment is not to be derived — exclusively or at all — from pre-political moral commitments, what scope is there for genuinely normative political thinking? And even if there is some scope for political normativity, does realism’s reliance on interpretations of political practices condemn it to some form of status quo bias? In this paper I address those questions. My main aim is to assuage some worries about realism’s alleged conservative tendencies. I argue that there is an important sense in which realists can support radical and even unachievable political change — one can be realistic and demand the impossible, as the soixante- huitard slogan goes. To see how that may be the case one needs to characterise realism by contrasting it with both non-ideal theory and utopianism. In a nutshell, realism differs from non- ideal theory because it need not be concerned with feasibility constraints, and it differs from utopianism because it eschews detailed blueprints of the perfect polity.

Conspiracy in Balzac and Sand's July Monarchy fiction

Abstract: ii Acknowledgements iii Abbreviations and References iv

International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation

Abstract: This comprehensive textbook charts the development of international relations as an academic discipline, from its foundations to the present day. The book first examines how great thinkers of the past considered relations between political and social units. It then looks at the emergence of the discipline which sought to explain the state system that had appeared in the seventeenth century. International relations "then" studies the conceptual worlds of eighteenth and nineteenth century theorists and practitioners. There follows the first of the great debates in the field, that between idealism and realism, which ended up with a consensus for the latter. The second part of the book looks at contemporary theory - how realism was challenged and then resurged - how world society and structuralist approaches are now well-established, and how what has been an Anglo-American discipline is poised now to become a genuinely global field.

On What a Distinctively Political Normativity Is

Abstract: Realists in normative political theory aim to defend the importance of ‘distinctively political thought’ as opposed to the applied ethics they believe characterizes much contemporary political theo...

From empowerment to response-ability: rethinking socio-spatial, environmental justice, and nature-culture binaries in the context of STEM education

Abstract: In this conceptual paper, we draw upon the insights of Feminist Science Studies, in particular Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism, as a critical analytical tool to re-think nature and culture binaries in dominant science knowledge-making practices and explanatory accounts, and their possible implications for science education in the context of socio-spatial and environmental injustices. Barad’s framework proposes a relational and more expansive approach to justice, which takes into account consequential effects of nature-culture practices on humans, non-humans, and more than human vitalities. In efforts to understand potentialities of Barad’s theory of agential realism, we situate our argument in the “story” of local children who encounter a bottle of cyanide in a former manufacturing building. The story takes place in a post-industrial urban city located in the U.S., caught up in an inverse relationship between the technological and scientific advances observed “globally” and the deteriorating environmental and living conditions experienced “locally” as the result of erstwhile industrial activity. Based on agential realist readings of the story and taking into consideration children’s developing subjectivities, we argue that equity-oriented scholarship in science education might not be able to achieve justice devoid of understanding of the relatedness to plurality of life forms. We invite our readers to consider (re)configuring socio-spatial and environmental issues as an ethical response-ability that is constituted through relationships of care, recognition, openness, and responsiveness to vitalities of humans and nonhumans equally, one which cannot be conceptualized from a priori and distant calculations, but rather continuous entangled relations.

Realistic health care simulation scenario: what is relevant for its design?

Abstract: We sought to describe the stages of scenario development with emphasis on the most relevant aspects according to the literature and guidelines of The International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning and Best Evidence Medical Education, which are discussed and exemplified on the basis of our professional experience. The following stages were described and commented on for scenario design: planning, objectives, simulation structure and format, case description and perception of realism, pre-debriefing, debriefing, evaluation, materials and resources, and pilot test. A scenario design based on good practices involves important elements, and each stage is closely interrelated and interdependent in its creation process.

Forms of the Peasant: Aesthetics and Social Thought in Russian Realism, 1847-1877

Abstract: Author(s): Flaherty, Jennifer | Advisor(s): Flaherty, Jennifer J | Abstract: At the center of this dissertation’s inquiry is Russian realism’s construction of what I call “the form of the peasant.” Created by writers, this mythic image emerged in tandem with the movement’s signature formal innovations in narrative perspective, poetic voice, and descriptive style. It also gave shape to the very ideas of history, national identity, subjectivity, and language which defined Russian realism as a literary movement. The three chapters approach several major texts – Ivan Turgenev’s Zapiski okhotnika [Notes from a Hunter] (1847-1852), Lev Tolstoy’s “Utro pomeshchika” (1852-1856) and Anna Karenina (1874-1877), and Nikolai Nekrasov’s Komu na Rusi zhit’ khorosho [Who in Russia Can Live well] (1866-1877) – from a historical and formalist perspective, offering a history of realist forms in the social and intellectual context from which they emerge and to which they contribute. Close readings of narrative and poetic texts are performed alongside analyses of a range of theoretical texts that are central to Russian social thought in the mid-nineteenth century, including works by Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, Alexander Potebnia, and G. W. F. Hegel. At the intersection of these analyses emerges a myth of agrarian life structured by social anxieties in three interpretative frameworks. First, realism is illuminated in its parallel development to serfdom abolition. Second, social identities (e.g., master and serf; peasant and intellectual) are shown to inhere in forms of narrative and lyric subjectivity. Finally, literature’s engagement with myths of peasant life as pre-modern or timeless belies a central preoccupation with the concept of history understood in terms of non-teleological change. Building on work across disciplines at the intersection of social thought and literary form and reassessments of realism across national traditions, this work is grounded in the belief that it is the nature of literary forms to complicate ideology, expressing ideas obliquely and exploring contradictions. My aim is to show how realism works at once to establish normative frameworks and undermine them, locating Russian realism’s engagement with the peasant myth in precisely this point of tension. Here, the “form of the peasant” expresses an escape from modernity as well as a confrontation with it. In “Forms of the Peasant,” Russian realism emerges as a literary movement with strong connections to other national traditions and historical epochs – connections based in paradigms of empire, class conflict, systems of bondage, and their aftermath.

What is theoretical progress of science

Abstract: The epistemic conception of scientific progress equates progress with accumulation of scientific knowledge. I argue that the epistemic conception fails to fully capture scientific progress: theoretical progress, in particular, can transcend scientific knowledge in important ways. Sometimes theoretical progress can be a matter of new theories ‘latching better onto unobservable reality’ in a way that need not be a matter of new knowledge. Recognising this further dimension of theoretical progress is particularly significant for understanding scientific realism, since realism is naturally construed as the claim that science makes theoretical progress. Some prominent realist positions (regarding fundamental physics, in particular) are best understood in terms of commitment to theoretical progress that cannot be equated with accumulation of scientific knowledge.

Comics realism and the Maus event : Comics and the dynamics of World War II remembrance

Abstract: In this thesis, I consider the causes and effects of the success of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) and chart the formal directions in which comics have subsequently moved historical representation. To do so, I conceptualize realism alongside the work of Fredric Jameson, Erich Auerbach, and Ernst Gombrich as a field of struggle in which different representational conventions strive to be perceived as realistic. With this approach to realism at hand, I undertake an academic reception study of Maus in order to show how its success resulted in a conception of historical representation in comics as uniquely suited to a subjective mode of realism. In the three case studies that follow, I challenge this all too narrow view of comics’ capabilities for historical representation by demonstrating that the depiction of the past in comics draws on the medium’s ability to render the past in densely layered combinations of subjective, historiographic and mechanic modes of realism in texts and images. By analyzing the way in which different modes of representing the past are brought together in Peter Pontiac’s Kraut (2001), Greg Pak and Carmine di Giandomenico’s Magneto: Testament (2008-2009), and Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths (1971), I not only show that the medium’s affordance for historical representation is much broader than is often assumed, I also uncover World War II comics as reflections of the impact of an ever-widening media landscape on the remembrance of World War II.

The moral aporia of race in international relations

Abstract: Drawing on recent scholarship on race, post-colonialism, and ethics in the field of international relations, I return to the ‘first debate’ in the field regarding realism versus liberalism to highl...

What we don’t know. the effect of realism in virtual reality on experience and behaviour

Abstract: This study addresses the question how realistic Virtual Worlds should be designed in order to create engaging experiences and stimulate ‘natural’ behaviour. Creating high realistic worlds is time consuming and expensive and it is unclear whether it is always needed. With the aim of gaining insights about questions related to presence and realism, an experiment involving 72 participants was set up upon a Virtual Reality cycling apparatus in which different levels of realism were created. Users were observed and evaluated regarding their experience (engagement, presence, naturalness and negative effects), awareness of realism and behaviour. The results indicate that, despite that differences in realism were observed, differences in realism do not have an effect on experience and behaviour. There seem other variables involved that can affect the whole experience in an enough intensity to obliterate the effects of a better sense of presence and realism. In addition, an increase in a perceived higher level of realism seems to be depended on a congruent increase of different elements within the virtual world. Merely increasing the level of realism of one element does not alter levels of perceived realism of users.

Witnessing loss in the everyday: Community buildings in austerity Britain:

Abstract: This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value...

Going local: a defense of methodological localism about scientific realism

Abstract: Scientific realism and anti-realism are most frequently discussed as global theses: theses that apply equally well across the board to all the various sciences. Against this status quo I defend the localist alternative, a methodological stance on scientific realism that approaches debates on realism at the level of individual sciences, rather than at science itself. After identifying the localist view, I provide a number of arguments in its defense, drawing on the diversity and disunity found in the sciences, as well as problems with other approaches (such as basing realism debates on the aim of science). I also show how the view is already at work, explicitly or implicitly, in the work of several philosophers of science. After meeting the objections that localism collapses either into globalism or hyperlocalism, I conclude by sketching what sorts of impacts localism can have in the philosophy of science.

The Instrument of Science: Scientific Anti-Realism Revitalised

Abstract: Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects. In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position—‘cognitive instrumentalism’—involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism. Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science.

Historical inductions, Old and New

Abstract: I review prominent historical arguments against scientific realism to indicate how they display a systematic overshooting in the conclusions drawn from the historical evidence. The root of the overshooting can be located in some critical, undue presuppositions regarding realism. I will highlight these presuppositions in connection with both Laudan’s ‘Old induction’ and Stanford’s New induction, and then delineate a minimal realist view that does without the problematic presuppositions.

#WeJamminStill : agential realism and Trinidad and Tobago's absent terrorism narrative

Abstract: This work examines the limitations of Securitisation Theory by applying it to an ethnographic case study of Trinidad and Tobago – the state with the highest per capita ISIL recruitment rate in the Western World. It examines the reasons for the absence of a terrorism narrative for that country until very recently, where one might expect a narrative to have existed for decades. It argues that securitisation thinkers must continue to extend their arguments, as gaps in the current approaches are limiting their utility. To make this argument it shows that while securitisation theory on its own, fails to explain the absence of a narrative due to ineffectively providing a means to address contextual considerations, Agential Realism is able to effectively integrate the necessary historical and cultural realities through the quantum thinking informing its diffractive methodology and its hauntological approach to time and space. In applying both securitisation theories and Agential Realism to the case, it can be seen that history and culture are deeply entangled with the security politics of Trinidad and Tobago as a post-colonial state – as they are for the many other former colonies which make up the global landscape. This work shows that conventional approaches to understanding security in Trinidad and Tobago are limited in the questions which they can answer and that if the discipline seeks to have more profound understandings of a wide range of actors and be truly ‘global’, it must be willing to continue to push the expanding boundaries of critical orthodoxy.

The question of realism for powers

Abstract: In recent years, a new dispute has risen to prominence: the dispute between realists and anti-realists about causal powers. Albeit sometimes overlooked, the meta-ontological features of this “question of realism for powers” are quite peculiar. For friends and foes of causal powers have characterized their contrasting views in a variety of different ways; as existence claims, as semantic or truth-making claims, as fundamentality claims, as claims about the nature of certain properties. Not only does this multiplicity of interpretations make it unclear what the genuine bone of contention is, if there is one; some of them appear to be mutually exclusive. Some light can be shed on this apparent yet widespread confusion by distinguishing three degrees of ontological involvement in dispositional truths; viz., three ways, of increasing robustness, to read ontological commitments from dispositional truths. Relatedly, by exploring the literature, and focusing on some selected examples of power realism and anti-realism, we can observe that power realists vastly disagree over the intrinsic nature ad make-up of dispositional properties. Such examples furthermore invite the thought that the question of realism for powers is best understood not as the debate around the existence of properties with a distinctive identity, but rather as a debate about metaphysical hierarchy. Finally, some anti-realists positions are indistinguishable from realist ones, using merely intensional resources: power realism is best appreciated by going hyperintensional.

How does matter matter in preschool science

Abstract: This chapter examines science practices in Swedish preschools (school form for children aged 1–5 years) in relation to three central themes in Karen Barad's agential realism: "non-human bodies as a ...

Following logical realism where it leads

Abstract: Logical realism is the view that there is logical structure in the world. I argue that, if logical realism is true, then we are deeply ignorant of that logical structure: either we can’t know which of our logical concepts accurately capture it, or none of our logical concepts accurately capture it at all. I don’t suggest abandoning logical realism, but instead discuss how realists should adjust their methodology in the face of this ignorance.

Scientific realism and phenomenology through the case study of autism

Abstract: In this thesis, I propose a radical reframing of the analytic scientific realism debate via the phenomenological concept of the life-world. I provide motivation for examining science’s situatedness by interrogating the observable aspects of the world. In so doing, I propose to drop any notions of ecumenical truth and reality in the frame of the debate. The case study of autism spectrum conditions (ASCs) is explored to demonstrate what this suggested reframing implies for scientific practice. I offer that the best construal of the observables is the concept of the life-world (Edmund Husserl’s lebenswelt) from continental phenomenology. I perform a series of analytic tweaks on the concept and define it, for the frame of this dissertation, to be the world of immediate – yet theory-laden and prism-mediated – experience as cashed out by a subject’s perceiving capacities. The main improvement of the life-world to traditional analytic construals of the observables is that it captures extra-linguistic elements, allowing us to interrogate these crucial facets of science that are not language- and theory-based strictu sensu. Following I highlight the life-world’s pluralistic dimensions. Theoretically, I do this by defending conceptual scheme pluralism against certain tendencies in the analytic philosophy of language, and then apply this defence to life-worlds. Turning to extant cases of life-world difference, I investigate the case study of autism spectrum conditions. I argue that what this case brings to the fore is first our being compelled to recognise the autistic life-world as ‘real and true’ in the way we take the neurologically typical life-world to be and, second, that autism spectrum conditions treatment should be oriented towards this life-world, in the sense of attempting to maximize happiness and well-being in its own terms. Unfortunately, this is found to be in stark contrast with the extant ASC-related treatment situation. Finally, I claim that we should philosophically be haunted less by any claims of ecumenical Truth and Reality and related, somewhat stale metaphysical issues typically associated with the debate. Rather, it is both more philosophically interesting and humanitarianly urgent to interrogate how what a science takes to be true shapes the practice itself and how it affects human lives associated with it. Theoretically, my philosophical position abides first and foremost by life-world incorrigibility and pluralism and is thus appropriately named pluralistic incorrigible realism (PIR). ‘True’ is here taken to cash out what is incorrigible for a perceiving subject, but whatever notion of truth may arise herein is only in the form of a (subjective or intersubjective) admittance within the confines of a life-world.

Moral (and ethical) realism

Abstract: This article advocates a naturalist and realist ethics of solidarity. Specifically, it argues that human needs should be met; and that they should be met in harmony with the environment. Re...

Past Continuous: The Chronopolitics of Representation in Syrian Television Drama

Abstract: Syria serves as a leading producer of the musalsal [dramatic miniseries], a key Arabic-language mass cultural form. With its dark realism and biting humor, Syrian drama has become a primary mode of...