THE NATURE OF FUTURE MYTHS: ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE IN SCIENCE FICTION FILM, 1950-1999

Given the need to transform the societal relationship with nature, culture demands analysis for the role it plays in defining nature and the relationship with nature. Important as future myths, the environmental discourse imbedded in popular science fiction films since the 1950s is analyzed toward this end. Cultural studies serves as a theoretical and methodological guide. For the most part, the films resonate with reproductive discourse, degrading nature as less valuable than the civilized and favoring a relationship with nature most beneficial to humanity. Specifically, these films glorify science and technology, portray civilization continuing to fill and dominate the wilderness of space, and devalue nature as hostile and inferior to civilization. Resistant discourse, content which values and demands a more benign relationship with nature, is also present, but is less common and arguably less potent. This finding is interpreted in terms of implications for change in the societal relationship with nature as well as in light of other analyses of culture which find evidence for a shift in culture in an ecological direction.     

LAST OF THE DINOSAURS? BIG WEAPONS,BIG SCIENCE,AND THE AMERICAN STATE FROM HIROSHIMA TO THE END OF THE COLD WAR

This article examines the origins and recent crises in linkages between big science, big weapons, and the U.S. state during and after the cold war. We examine the sources of legitimacy of military dominance of U.S. research and development (R&D) in the first decades of the cold war and argue that the exigencies of a nuclear arms race between two superpowers gave the military an unprecedented peacetime claim on science and technology resources. We argue that economic crises, political challenges by peace movements, and technological exhaustion of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s weakened military claims to science and technology leadership, but that the 1991 Persian Gulf war deflected what might have been a major shift in U.S. R&D priorities. We conclude by examining U.S. post-cold war R&D policy and find that military priorities remain preeminent.     

Beyond Presentism and Historicism: Understanding the History of Social Science

The revival of interest in the social scientific past has stimulated a growing literature on the methodology of the history of social science. Existing "presentist" type histories have been criticized for their "Whiggish" assumptions about scientific progress. The critique of presentism is the product of a new school of historians of social science who advocate a "historicist" historiography. My paper is addressed to this discussion and falls into three parts. First, I review the principles of presentist and historicist historiographies, relating their methodological positions to their theories of science. Second, I take up the argument of the "new historicism" in more detail, criticizing its theory of textual interpretation and its theory of social scientific development. I conclude by offering an alternative historiographic model of social scientific development based upon a theory of science that I outline.     

On the almost inconceivable misunderstandings concerning the subject of value‐free social science

A value judgment says what is good or bad, and value‐free social science simply means social science free of value judgments. Yet many sociologists regard value‐free social science as undesirable or impossible and readily make value judgments in the name of sociology. Often they display confusion about such matters as the meaning of value‐free social science, value judgments internal and external to social science, value judgments as a subject of social science, the relevance of objectivity for value‐free social science, and the difference between the human significance of social science and value‐free social science. But why so many sociologists are so value‐involved – and generally so unscientific – is sociologically understandable: The closest and most distant subjects attract the least scientific ideas. And during the past century sociologists have become increasingly close to their human subject. The debate about value‐free social science is also part of an epistemological counterrevolution of humanists (including many sociologists) against the more scientific social scientists who invaded and threatened to expropriate the human subject during the past century.     

SKIPPER SCIENCE:

This research examines success in fishing from perspectives of science studies and the sociology of work, emphasizing the common elements between the processes of fishing, creative work and scientific practice. It focuses on the expertise of the fishing skippers as they attempt to enhance their fishing success by assessment of evidence, framing of questions and inventing ways to answer these questions. In the process they set and solve problems to deal with uncertainties and uniqueness. It is shown how the skippers develop their knwledge by recording and analyzing data, systematic observation and limited experimentation. The findings demonstrate the importance of craft work and skill in the innovative process and thus bridge the gap between sociology of work and the social studies of science.     

Social acceleration and the network effect: a defence of social ‘science fiction’ and network determinism

This essay is a response to Judy Wajcman's essay ‘Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time’ (2008: 59–77). In that article Wajcman argued that recent developments in the sociology of temporal change had been marked by a tendency in social theory towards a form of ‘science fiction’– a sociological theorizing, she maintains, that bears no real relation to actual, empirically provable developments in the field and should therefore be viewed as not contributing to ‘a richer analysis of the relationship between technology and time’ (2008: 61). This reply argues that as Wajcman suggests in her essay, there is indeed an ‘urgent need for increased dialogue to connect social theory with detailed empirical studies’ (2008: 59) but that the most fruitful way to proceed would not be through a constraining of ‘science fiction’ social theorizing but, rather, through its expansion – and more, that ‘science fiction’ should take the lead in the process. This essay suggests that the connection between social theory and empirical studies would be strengthened by a wider understanding of the function of knowledge and research in the context of what is termed ‘true originality’ and ‘routine originality’. The former is the domain of social theory and the latter resides within traditional sociological disciplines. It is argued that both need each other to advance our understanding of society, especially in the context of the fast‐changing processes of technological development. The example of ‘technological determinism’ is discussed as illustrative of how ‘routine originality’ can harden into dogma without the application of ‘true originality’ to continually question (sometimes through ideas that may appear to border on ‘science fiction’) comfortable assumptions that may have become ‘routine’ and shorn of their initial ‘originality’.     

Versions of the Pastoral: Poverty and the Poor in English Fiction from the 1840s to the 1950s

Abstract: Fictional treatment of the poor has varied with changing perceptions of their position and role in English society. In part these perceptions have been affected by the social locations of the writers. But this essay argues that a major determinant of the treatment of the poor has been the inheritance of a pastoral tradition of viewing them. Writers have largely worked within this tradition. Only in the 1930s was a determined attempt made to break out of it. This failed, and after the war fiction gradually abandoned its efforts to deal with the poor, preferring to leave that to the newer media of film and television.     

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE NATURE OF SCIENCE

The debate about the patenting of research is perhaps the most passionate now taking place about science and scientific culture. It is widely maintained that the expansion of patenting since about 1980 betrays a scientific tradition to which norms of universalism and common ownership of knowledge were central. This paper goes back to mid-twentieth century debates about science and intellectual property (IP) to argue that many of the norms we take as so central to science were themselves first articulated to critique patenting practices. In particular, it looks at how an economist (Arnold Plant), a scientist/philosopher (Michael Polanyi), and an information theorist (Norbert Wiener) responded to such practices. It especially focuses on the role of intellectual-property concerns in the making of Polanyi's philosophy of science, which it excavates through a reading of his unpublished papers. This reveals that the modern field of ‘science studies’ is indebted for some of its key concepts to an earlier generation of patent wars – an inheritance that exemplifies some of the strange ways in which the sociopolitical meanings of ideas can change from generation to generation. The point is not that present-day critics of scientific patenting are wrong, but that the very terms of the debate are more deeply-seated in the development of scientific culture than any of us has realized.     

MODERN SCIENCE: Institutionalization of Knowledge and Rationalization of Power

This essay explores the relationship of scientific knowledge to political and economic power. By comparing intellectual production to economic production, the author identifies three preconditions for a knowledge discourse to achieve monopoly domination or hegemony in its market sector or cognitive domain. First, the knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized; that is, as a unique product or service. Second, it must be credently represented as useful to dominant groups. Finally, it must achieve institutionalization. Ethnographies of scientific discourse and practice, as well as social histories of science, provide data relevant to this model. Such studies reveal the rhetorically constructed character of scientific knowledge, and hence its openness to social and political influence. But these studies also show how scientists strive to standardization; that is, they seek to render their somewhat ad hoc activities in the laboratory into replicable and reputable public accounts. The norms and techniques of this locally created standardization emerged historically, mainly in the form of objectivity and numeracy. These standards in turn serve politically to demarcate legitimate scientists from amateurs and quacks, thereby satisfying the first precondition of the model—that to be successful a knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized. Cognitive boundaries enabled social boundaries-chiefly the marking of distinctions between disciplines and the organization of their practitioners into professional guilds. Through the creation and enforcement of such distinctions, product identification, market allocation, and oligopolization were secured. These processes also required investment capital to sustain intellectual production. Thus, to institutionalize their disciplines and themselves in research universities and specialized scientific-administrative centers, practitioners sought to demonstrate their utility to potential clients and patrons. Along the way, the disciplines became more instrumentally oriented, their concepts, methods, and topics shaped to conform to the requirements of professionalization and institutionalization. The very language of science also changed in accordance with its new emphases. The close institutionalized affinity of cognitive, political, and economic interests was largely established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new, institutionalized, scientific knowledge and the new, rationalized, statist and corporate     

Fat in the Fire? Science,the News Media,and the “Obesity Epidemic”2

In recent years, the “obesity epidemic” has emerged as a putative public health crisis. This article examines the interconnected role of medical science and news reporting in shaping the way obesity is framed as a social problem. Drawing on a sample of scientific publications on weight and health, and press releases and news reporting on these publications, we compare and contrast social problem frames in medical science and news reporting. We find substantial overlap in science and news reporting, but the news media do dramatize more than the studies on which they are reporting and are more likely than the original science to highlight individual blame for weight. This is partly due to the news media’s tendency to report more heavily on the most alarmist and individual‐blaming scientific studies. We find some evidence that press releases also shape which articles receive media coverage and how they are framed.     

Politicizing the spirit: ‘American Africanisms’ and African ancestors in the essays of Toni Morrison

This article is a comparative study of American and Soviet programmes of space/cosmos elaboration in terms of ideological and technological competition during the era of the cold war. It is in a sense a rereading of a book written by Nikolai Nosov for Soviet children called Neznaika on the Moon (1965). This book – which was the most popular among Soviet children in the 1960s and 1970s – helps to uncover ideological and technological paradigms of the time when outer space happened to be the scene of the cold war conflict. The subject of space/cosmos has been studied in many contextual respects. However, there are four key notions – such as technology, ideology, time, consciousness – which make it possible to see similarities and differences between American and Soviet scientific approaches to outer space.     

Dualistic hearts: social class, education, different cultures, and lesbian love in desert hearts

Donna Deitch's Desert Hearts, one of the highest-grossing lesbian films ever made, is a groundbreaking and poignant movie about self-discovery and self-acceptance. This article focuses on the societal obstacles-such as vastly different social classes, cultures, and educational backgrounds-that Vivian and Cay must overcome in order to begin their relationship. The article also shows the taboos faced by gays in the 1950s, such as the firing of college professors in that era. The latent lesbian desire of the homophobic Frances, which is rarely addressed in criticism of the film, is discussed in detail.     

Affective machines or the inner self? Drawing the boundaries of the female body in the socialist romantic imagination

This article explores two conflicting aesthetics of the female body in post-Stalinist Soviet science fiction. One represented women of the communist future as explorers of the space frontier in assemblages with machines, testing the cultural border between the female and the technological. Another appealed to the mysterious female nature as the Other of human culture, pushing forward the understanding of socialist progress as a masculine project. This article argues that both aesthetics grew within the cultural phenomenon of socialist Romanticism, which emerged in the mid-1950s as a reaction to Stalin-era quasi-Enlightenment rationality and its dominant style of socialist realism.     

Spatial Form and Character Revelations: Korolenko’s Siberian Stories

Arguably, few popular films during the last decade have caused so much debate, and been more frequently quoted as film The Matrix (1999), written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. This paper analyzes allusions to the film in four works of contemporary Russian prose fiction. These works exploit, to various degrees, The Matrix in order to evoke visual representations from the film, and to draw on structural concepts and similarities. Further, I argue that references to The Matrix are made in order to benefit from the film’s eclectic mythological concepts and transpose them to the literary realm. This kind of cross-fertilization could be seen as a growing trend where the borders between different media are becoming more fluid, and where they benefit from each other, be they novels, films, or computer games.     

Staying the Course: On the Value of Social Studies of Science in Resistance to the “Post‐Truth” Movement

Scientific knowledge has been under attack recently, especially during and from the Trump administration. This article discusses the value of research in social studies of science in relation to scientific practice and post‐truth attacks on science. This literature analyzes the expert work and social values that enter into the production of evidence, the development and testing of methods, and the construction of theoretical and epistemological frames for connecting evidence, methods, and methodologies. Although researchers in this area argue that there are politics in science, this article demonstrates that their analyses of the processes of adjudicating evidence and epistemologies contribute to science. In contrast, post‐truth attacks on scientific expertise exemplify a particular kind of politics aimed at supporting a particular group's political and economic interests.     

Using a Book Group to Facilitate Student Learning About Social Work

The focus of this short paper is the increasingly popular format of the book group. This format has been used on an undergraduate social work programme in the UK with the aim of engaging students, as some enjoy reading fiction for pleasure but find it harder to read social science. The BA Social Work Book Group has met regularly to discuss non-social science books, such as novels and autobiographies. A specific example is presented of a best-selling novel with significant social work content (J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy) and the book group's discussion of this. The strengths and limitations of book groups in social work education are drawn out.     

The Sociologies of Knowledge,Science, and Intellectuals: Distinctive Traditions and Overlapping Perspectives

This article reviews sociological approaches to the production, evaluation, and diffusion of knowledge in the arena of scholarly production – the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. At first glance, sociological approaches to scholarly knowledge production seem to congeal around the hard sciences, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other. I eschew this polarization and construct an analytic frame of reference for analyzing the sociological dimensions of scholarly production more generally. This article maps successive phases of sociological approaches to scholarly production, by overlaying and distinguishing among theories in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, and sociology of intellectuals. I analyze classical theorists’ emphases on class analysis and the social function of intellectuals; mid-century adaptations of functionalism, social structure theory, and institutional theory to analyze intellectual and academic life; critical and reflexive theories, including feminist critiques of science and knowledge; recent emphases on how social movement politics and social networks influence intellectual change; theories of the university as a professional arena and a field of culture production; and studies of knowledge-making practices in group research situations. In addition to arguing for more theoretical and methodological precision in analyses of scholarly and scientific knowledge-making, I conclude with cautionary tales and future prospects for sociological studies of modern academic life.     

Phenomenology and Film: An Examination of a Religious Approach to Film Theory by Henri Agel and Amedee Ayfre

French film theorists have made a great impact on filmmaking through their essays on the nature and policies of film. The French phenomenologists search for a spiritual reality beyond the semiotic and materialistic theories represented in cinema criticism today. They argue that as the most important of modern art forms, cinema must embrace the realms of the imagination and the divine. This article sets out to examine the writings of two French film theorists of the 1950s and 1960s, the phenomenologists Henri Agel and Amedee Ayfre, whose work is little known in the United States because it has not been translated into English. Their importance lies in their concern with transcendence in film, which has made an important contribution to the way we can understand spirituality in film. Their writings were popularized in the United States by screenwriter and film director Paul Schrader (1972) in his book Transcendental Style in Film. In this article I examine phenomenological theories and suggest that certain films made in Texas in the 1980s display the virtues of a phenomenological approach to filmmaking.     

The future of the social sciences and humanities in the science of complex systems

The modern world is characterized by problems that involve systems with social and physical subsystems. They are entangled systems of system of systems with multilevel dynamics. There is no methodology able to combine the partial micro-, meso- and macrotheories that focus on subsystems into a coherent representation of the dynamics of the whole. Policy requires prediction, but the traditional definitions of prediction are not appropriate for multilevel socio-complex systems. Heterogeneous multilevel systems have subsystems that may behave with great regularity over long periods of time, and then suddenly change their behavior due to weak coupling with other subsystems. Thus systems that are usually highly predictable may be subject to rare but extreme events, and this is highly relevant to policy-makers. New ways of thinking are needed that transcend the confines of the traditional humanities, social and physical sciences. Of necessity, this science will be embedded in the design, implementation and management of systems, and therefore the new science will be entwined with policy. Much policy is interventionist experiment. By themselves scientists cannot conduct experiments on socio-complex systems because they have neither the mandate nor the money to design and instrument experiments on the large scale. Policy-makers – elected politicians and their officers – design the future, making it as they believe it ought to be. New kinds of scientific predictions can inform policy but can only be instrumented and tested if there is goodwill between policy-makers and scientists, where scientists are junior partners. Scientists offer policy-makers theories and predictions of social systems based on logical-deductive methods. Policy is generally made on the basis of rhetoric, with the best possible arguments being deployed to support favored conclusions. To convince policy-makers that a particular scientific theory should be used, scientists move from the logical-deductive to the rhetorical. Thus the full theory of a science of complex systems has to provide a logical-deductive metatheory of the rhetorical and logical-deductive systems that make decisions and implement them. Traditional natural and physical science has avoided rhetoric, which is much better understood in the humanities and social sciences. Thus it is concluded that the science of complex systems must embrace the humanities and social sciences not just because their domains of study are relevant but also because their methods are necessary to understand how science and policy work together in complex social systems.