Platonic Forehand versus Aristotelian Smash - the use of computers as macroscopes in knowing the social world

This paper draws on Desrosie ¤ res, Hayles and Tukey in arguing for an exploratory approach to the use of numerical taxonomy and related approaches in quantitative social research. It asserts that rather than trying to develop algorithm (either in the form of equation sets or game rules) based representations which abstract 'variables' as analogies of Newtonian forces, we should centre on cases and deal with classifications. Then trajectories can be explored in terms of changes both in the classification location of particular cases and changes in the actual form of the classification sets themselves. This approach seems to correspond with Aristotle's notion of intuitive induction with computing technology understood as extending the cognitive capacities of the taxonomist.     

Eating Disorders and Recovery: Lessons from Overeaters Anonymous

The experience of compulsive eating and recovery, as perceived by women members of the self-help organization Overeaters Anonymous (OA), was qualitatively studied by examining the worldview transformation of the members. A worldview transformation was found in four domains: (a) experience of self; (b) Universal Order/God; (c) relationships with others; (d) perception of the problem. Understanding the personal experience of worldview transformation of OA members may be adapted to the clinical setting for eating disorders. Guidelines for such an adaptation are proposed.     

Worldviews or Social Groups as the Source of Moral Value Attitudes: Implications for the Culture Wars Thesis

Individual moral value attitudes are typically explained by reference to social experiences as indicated by social group variables. Contrary to this view, the emergent culture wars perspective claims that two worldviews that transcend social groups are ultimately and fundamentally responsible for moral value attitudes. Although this relationship has been claimed for the general population, it has not been investigated with national representative data. This paper contrasts the worldview and social group explanations by examining the relative importance of the worldviews implicated in the culture wars literature and the social groups found to be important in previous research. I find social groups to be more important than worldviews, but that worldviews also have explanatory power. I conclude with a discussion about possible clarifications of the culture wars thesis.     

Rethinking a Case of Paranoia as a Workplace Complaint

This essay re-reads Freud’s essay “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Theory of the Disease” (1963) through Marxist feminist writing on the division of labor. I approach the story presented in that essay as a workplace complaint and use it to meditate on sexual harassment as a haunting of the workplace.     

Political Scientists

This essay raises several issues triggered by Norah Mackendrick's (2017) piece “Out of the Labs and into the Streets,” which appeared in “The Forum.” Using that essay as a springboard, I reflect on the complicated relationship between science and politics.     

Who cares about the environment?

ABSTRACT

Environmental behavior substantially differs among individuals depending on their environmental attitudes, connectivity to nature beliefs, and socioeconomic profile. People who adopt an eco-friendly lifestyle and those who are unconcerned about environmental protection represent population segments with diverse characteristics. Consequently, this study aims to identify homogeneous groups based on individuals’ environmental behavior. A total of 400 Greek citizens completed a self-report questionnaire. We used behavioral items adopted from previous studies to measure environmental behavior and background variables to assess the socio-demographic profile of the respondents. Additionally, we used the well-established measures of Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) and New Ecological Paradigm Scale (NEP) to measure people's relatedness with nature and their ecological beliefs separately. Multivariate Cluster Analysis results indicated that participants can be grouped into two broad segments, named moderate eco-friends and non-environmentalists. Individual differences between the clusters were detected with respect to gender, education, connectedness to nature and ecological worldview.     

Queering the Word: Patricia Nell Warren's Adaptation of Christian Sacraments in The Fancy Dancer

The essay explores the ways in which Patricia Nell Warren's The Fancy Dancer (1976) employs Roman Catholic sacraments to depict the developing sexuality of a young gay priest. The essay explores the parallels between sacramental spiritual development and the individual and communal markers of a burgeoning gay or lesbian identity. Additionally, the novel's connections between conversion narratives and coming-out narratives are examined. The essay argues that Warren, in using the rhetoric, symbols, and models of the Church differently, disrupts the narrow epistemology underlying Christianity. Finally, novels such as Warren's suggest that gay and lesbian authors can adapt elements of Christianity while undermining its oppressive presumptions, and establishing a liberatory rhetoric that maintains the intelligibility and recognizability of familiar Christian models.     

It gets better ... all in good time: messianic rhetoric and a political theology of social control

Working from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” this essay examines the recent interest in the messianic and messianicity in continental philosophy. To ground its discussion, the essay analyzes two recent cultural examples of messianic rhetoric – Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and Dan Savage’s 2010 It Gets Better Project, in order to explore hidden theological dimensions of recent cultural and political discourse in the US. The essay argues that both examples showcase a reliance on the language of the messianic promise as a means of creating a docile public focused on imagined future liberation rather than a critical confrontation of the often violent and disturbing realities of the now. At the same time that the essay problematizes messianic rhetoric’s connection to deeply entrenched narratives of “progress,” the essay also works to posit alternative visions of the messianic and to question whether it is possible to redefine the concept of messianism without relying on a narrative of progress which is outdated, irresponsible, and likely violent. In the end, the essay explores how the language of queer theory, with its resistance to traditional logics of future-oriented (re)production, might provide a useful vocabulary for such a reimagining of the messianic.     

Understanding the social and cultural bases of Brexit*

We use data from a large scale and nationally representative survey to evaluate two narratives about the social bases of Brexit. The first narrative sees Brexit as a revolt of the economically left-behinds. The second narrative attributes Brexit to the resurgence of an English nationalism. There is some, albeit not always consistent, evidence that people in relative poverty or those living in areas that have seen greater Chinese import penetration are slightly more pro-Leave. People living in economically deprived neighborhoods are not more pro-Brexit. Using the Weberian class–status distinction, it is social status, not social class, which stratifies Brexit support. Individuals for whom being British is important are more pro-Leave. But those who see themselves as British rather than English, and those reporting omnivorous cultural consumption are less supportive of Brexit. Overall, there is empirical support for both narratives. But the weight of the evidence suggests a strong cultural dimension in Brexit support.     

The Queer(y)ing of Australian Public Culture Discourse: Activism, Rights Discourse, and Survival Strategies

This essay examines the contemporary context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activism in Australia situating the theoretical and practical concerns in the ambit of survival strategies and rights discourse. Drawing on media, interviews, and a specific piece of proposed legislation, the essay surveys and analyses the effects of LGBT strategies of survival that are demonstrated in public culture discourse. The socio-cultural and political terrain of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australia bears witness to a public culture discourse that is deeply ambivalent about its LGBT dimensions.     

Introduction

Abstract

“What impact has city life on the individual–our behavior, personality, values, relationships?” George Simmel's 1905 publication of “The metropolis and mental life” remains a seminal essay on this central yet neglected question which we now term “urban psychology.” The centenary of Simmel's essay in 2005 is an apt time to take stock of the history and current status of urban psychology, with a special issue of this journal gathering data-based articles on diverse aspects of urban psychology. This four-part article (a) summarizes Simmel's 1905 essay, (b) comments on the dramatic population trends since 1905, (c) elaborates on 10 remarkable points about urban psychology, past and present, and (d) previews the five urban pychology reports in this special issue.     

Translator's Introduction to Max Weber's Essay on Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology*

The essay on “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology” is Max Weber's first systematic statement of his own sociology. Weber had written earlier as an economist and as a methodologist of the social sciences. But in this essay, he sets forth the method and indicates the scope of his interpretive sociology. He delineates the boundaries between it and two neighboring disciplines (psychology and law) and defines some basic concepts or categories of social action. The essay first appeared in 1913 in Logos, an interdisciplinary journal of which Weber was an editor.     

Diffracting the rays of technoscience: a situated critique of representation

This essay focuses on the possibility of adopting a representational approach for technoscience, in which representation is considered as a situated process of dynamic "intra-action" (Barad 2007). Re-elaborating the recent critiques of representationalism (Thrift 2008), my analysis begins by analysing Hayles's situated model of representation from an early essay where she explains her definition of constrained constructivism (Hayles [1991] 1997). The essay then discusses the notions of figuration and diffraction and the way they are employed by Haraway in many of her writings for her critique of technoscience (Haraway 1991, 1997). Finally, after considering diffraction through Barad's reading of this practice in the context of her theory of agential realism (2007), it shows the links that relate constrained constructivism, situated knowledge and agential realism, and the way all of them work at "diffract[ing] the rays of technoscience" (Haraway 1997: 16) through an alternative representational practice.     

Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.     

The Best Years of Their Lives: A Portrait of a Residential Home for People With AIDS

The article results from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the “Tahitian Islander,” an apartment building in Florida for people with AIDs. This essay offers stories of three longtime residents as a way of describing and interpreting discourse that creates and maintains a sense of self and place. By using a narrative form that is built around dialogue, the author offers examples of how people with AIDS (PWAs) talk about themselves and talk to each other. Through the particulars of daily practice and conversation, this essay shows us that PWAs are actively and continually engaged in the production of identity and community.     

The Syrian corpse: the politics of dignity in visual and media representations of the Syrian revolution*

This essay explores the material, phenomenological and political meaning of the Syrian corpse and the question of its dignity as represented in a series of media and visual outputs from 2011 to the present. The essay begins by arguing that the violence in Syria now targets the dead as much as the living. As such, the essay highlights the forms of ‘necroviolence’ that the Syrian corpse has been subjected to: mistreatment, erasure of markers of identity, denial of burial, mutilation and ultimately an attempt to erase it from memory. The essay concludes by arguing that the Syrian corpse is not merely the passive subject or victim of ‘necroviolence’ but can also become the paradoxical agent of what we might call ‘postmortem resistance’.     

Strange Tempest: Agency, Poststructuralism, and the Shape of Feminist Politics to Come

This essay explores Judith Butler's influence on feminist and gender studies at two levels. First, the essay examines Butler's specific theoretical contributions with special attention to the performativity of gender and the conception of agency connected with it. It highlights the contributions and limitations of Butler's account of agency and the ongoing feminist conversation that it has incited. Second, this essay explores how Butler's account of agency has unsettled feminist conceptions of established political practice and sketches how specific responses to Butler's work provide clues to key contested issues. The essay closes with a brief look at feminist scholarship that draws together Butler-informed political visions with traditional accounts of feminist political practice in a manner that foreshadows a dynamic feminist politics yet to come.     

The end(s) of immanence in the anthropocene: militarized ecologies and the future of Deleuzian thought

Two features bear down fundamentally on our current historical occasion: structures of security, and breakdowns of planetary ecosystems. This essay argues that Deleuze is not only tracing a “geophilosophy” (that is, a nonhuman-centered theory of history that includes a geohistory of the planet) that moves from nomadic through State and finally through neoliberal forms that extend beyond the power of the State, but that he is also moving toward a theory of “control” that can teach us a great deal about the rise of the security society and its relation to the anthropocene. More specifically, this essay argues that philosophy is at a moment when the stakes of Deleuze’s conceptualizations of “immanence” have changed. This change hinges on the ecological circumstances of the twenty-first century – a set of conditions considerably underway, involving a course unlikely to change in time to reverse the seriousness of the situation (due in part to the supremacy of a self-destructive international neoliberal politics). The essay concludes by more sharply defining the workings of security in relation to immanence in the anthropocene.     

Bourdieu in Contention and Deliberation: Response to Lamont and Lizardo

This essay responds to Lamont’s (2011) article “How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United States,” and Lizardo’s (2011) essay “The Three Phases of Bourdieu’s U.S. Reception,” both of which appear in this issue.