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Contemporary Social Theory (contemporary + social_theory)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

THE VISIBILITY AND INVISIBILITY OF PRODUCTION AMONG SENEGALESE CRAFTSMEN

THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 4 2004
Roy Dilley
This article examines three social contexts of the production and exchange of craft objects in Senegal. In each context, the extent to which the production of craft items is visible or invisible varies, and these variations in turn affect the ways in which value is construed. These examples are understood as different ,regimes of value' (Appadurai), in whose constitution the production of craft objects, whether this is visible or invisible, plays a crucial role. The argument is that the concept of ,regime of value' needs to address more than simply the ,flow' of commodities, and must have regard for the organization of the relations between production, distribution, and consumption of craft objects. The article also frames these West African examples within a broader argument about the importance of the concept of production in order to redress the over-reliance of contemporary social theories on notions of consumption. [source]

Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation,state building, migration and the social sciences

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2002
Andreas Wimmer
Methodological nationalism is understood as the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world. We distinguish three modes of methodological nationalism that have characterized mainstream social science, and then show how these have influenced research on migration. We discover parallels between nationalist thinking and the conceptualization of migration in postwar social sciences. In a historical tour d'horizon, we show that this mainstream concept has developed in close interaction with nation,state building processes in the West and the role that immigration and integration policies have played within them. The shift towards a study of ,transnational communities', the last phase in this process , was more a consequence of an epistemic move away from methodological nationalism than of the appearance of new objects of observation. The article concludes by recommending new concepts for analysis that, on the one hand, are not coloured by methodological nationalism and, on the other hand, go beyond the fluidism of much contemporary social theory. [source]

Re-engaging the Intersections of Media, Politics and Cities , Introduction to a Debate

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2009
SCOTT RODGERS
Within contemporary social theory and social science, urban and media studies are seen as zones of speciality, with distinctive theoretical traditions and substantive concerns. This introduction situates the four short essays making up this Debates and Developments section in relation to a recent interdisciplinary workshop held in June 2008 at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, where participants were encouraged to experiment with and rework the longstanding conceptual differences and disciplinary policing that so often sets apart media and urban studies. The essays showcased here focus on the theoretical approaches urban scholars might bring to bear on studies of how cities and media come together around matters of politics. Résumé Dans le cadre de la théorie sociale contemporaine et des sciences sociales, les études urbaines et relatives aux médias sont considérées comme des domaines de spécialité assortis de traditions théoriques et de préoccupations majeures distinctes. Cette introduction situe les quatre courtes contributions aux ,Débats et développements' par rapport à un récent séminaire interdisciplinaire qui s'est tenu en juin 2008 à l'Open University de Milton Keynes, en Angleterre. Les participants y étaient invités àéprouver et remanier les divergences conceptuelles persistantes et l'ordre disciplinaire qui, si souvent, séparent études urbaines et études sur les médias. Les textes présentés ici portent principalement sur les approches théoriques que la recherche urbaine pourrait mettre en oeuvre pour étudier comment villes et médias se rejoignent autour de sujets de politique. [source]

The Secret Life of Things: Rethinking Social Ontology

JOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 3 2003
Iordanis Marcoulatos
Despite a recent resurgence of interest in social ontology, the standard conceptualization of social/cultural objects reiterates dichotomies such as nature and culture, subjectivity and objectivity: the objective components of a social/cultural environment are usually divided into their (symbolically vacuous) material substratum, natural or manufactured, and their imposed or assigned social import. Inert materiality and subjectively or intersubjectively assigned meanings and functions remain distinct as constitutive aspects of a reality that is intuitively experienced as a whole. In contrast,by means of examining a broad range of natural/cultural entities,I propose an experiential or visceral ontology of the social, which addresses the comprehensive nature of our experience of cultural objects, as well as their perpetual transmutability within the space between nature and culture, objectivity and subjectivity. This perspective allows for a cathexis of meaning in the material constitution of cultural entities,in contrast to a mere imposition of detachable layers of meaning,and suggests a reconsideration of our unexamined perception of social/political action as editorial supervision and correction. Moreover, I point out the centrality of the concept of practice for recovering the lived sense of social things, since practice, by virtue of its inalienable informality, constitutes the field of Protean renewal of this sense. I understand my approach as complementary to the body-turn in contemporary social theory, since I extend the postulation of meaningfulness in the objective aspect of subjective existence (i.e. the body) towards its lived surroundings, which are here perceived as engaged in a process of meaningful practiced reciprocations with corporeal subjectivities. [source]