Author: Andreas Glaeser
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226297950
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 642
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Book Description
What does the durability of political institutions have to do with how actors form knowledge about them? Andreas Glaeser investigates this question in the context of a fascinating historical case: socialist East Germany’s unexpected self-dissolution in 1989. His analysis builds on extensive in-depth interviews with former secret police officers and the dissidents they tried to control as well as research into the documents both groups produced. In particular, Glaeser analyzes how these two opposing factions’ understanding of the socialist project came to change in response to countless everyday experiences. These investigations culminate in answers to two questions: why did the officers not defend socialism by force? And how was the formation of dissident understandings possible in a state that monopolized mass communication and group formation? He also explores why the Stasi, although always well informed about dissident activities, never developed a realistic understanding of the phenomenon of dissidence. Out of this ambitious study, Glaeser extracts two distinct lines of thought. On the one hand he offers an epistemic account of socialism’s failure that differs markedly from existing explanations. On the other hand he develops a theory—a sociology of understanding—that shows us how knowledge can appear validated while it is at the same time completely misleading.
Author: Pietro Daniel Omodeo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030231208
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 158
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Book Description
This book is an investigation of the ideological dimensions of the disciplinary discourses on science in line with the scholarly tradition of historical epistemology. It offers a programmatic treatment of the political-epistemological problematic along three entangled lines of inquiry: socio-historical, epistemological and historiographical. The book aims for a meta-level integration of the existing scholarship on the social and cultural history of science in order to consider the ways in which struggles for hegemony have constantly informed scientific discourses. This problematic is of primary relevance for scholars in Science Studies, philosophers, historians and sociologists of science, but would also be relevant for anybody interested in scientific culture and political theory.
Author: Lani Watson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429798431
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 127
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Book Description
This book provides the first comprehensive philosophical examination of the right to know and other epistemic rights: rights to goods such as information, knowledge, and truth.
Author: D.A. Wood
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030499626
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
European colonization played a major role in the acquisition, formation, and destruction of different ways of knowing. Recently, many scholars and activists have come to ask: Are there ways in which knowledge might be decolonized? Epistemic Decolonization examines a variety of such projects from a critical and philosophical perspective. The book introduces the unfamiliar reader to the wide variety of approaches to the topic at hand, providing concrete examples along the way. It argues that the predominant contemporary approach to epistemic decolonization leads one into various intractable theoretical and practical problems. The book then closely investigates the political and scientific work of Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral, demonstrating how their philosophical commitments can help lead one out of the practical and theoretical issues faced by the current, predominant orientation, and concludes by forging links between their work and that of some contemporary feminist epistemologists.
Author: Jacques Ranciere
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847064450
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
A brand new collection of Jacques Rancière's writings on art and politics.
Author: Julian Gewirtz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067428738X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
A BBC History Magazine Best Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year The history the Chinese Communist Party has tried to erase: the dramatic political debates of the 1980s that could have put China on a path to greater openness. On a hike in Guangdong Province in January 1984, Deng Xiaoping was warned that his path was a steep and treacherous one. “Never turn back,” the Chinese leader replied. That became a mantra as the government forged ahead with reforms in the face of heated contestation over the nation’s future. For a time, everything was on the table, including democratization and China’s version of socialism. But deliberation came to a sudden halt in spring 1989, with protests and purges, massacre and repression. Since then, Beijing has worked intensively to suppress the memory of this era of openness. Julian Gewirtz recovers the debates of the 1980s, tracing the Communist Party’s diverse attitudes toward markets, state control, and sweeping technological change, as well as freewheeling public argument over political liberalization. The administration considered bold proposals from within the party and without, including separation between the party and the state, empowering the private sector, and establishing an independent judiciary. After Tiananmen, however, Beijing systematically erased these discussions of alternative directions. Using newly available Chinese sources, Gewirtz details how the leadership purged the key reformist politician Zhao Ziyang, quashed the student movement, recast the transformations of the 1980s as the inevitable products of consensus, and indoctrinated China and the international community in the new official narrative. Never Turn Back offers a revelatory look at how different China’s rise might have been and at the foundations of strongman rule under Xi Jinping, who has intensified the policing of history to bolster his own authority.
Author: Virag Molnar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317796438
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
The built environment of former socialist countries is often deemed uniform and drab, an apt reflection of a repressive regime. Building the State peeks behind the grey façade to reveal a colourful struggle over competing meanings of the nation, Europe, modernity and the past in a divided continent. Examining how social change is closely intertwined with transformations of the built environment, this volume focuses on the relationship between architecture and state politics in postwar Central Europe using examples from Hungary and Germany. Built around four case studies, the book traces how architecture was politically mobilized in the service of social change, first in socialist modernization programs and then in the postsocialist transition. Building the State does not only offer a comprehensive survey of the diverse political uses of architecture in postwar Central Europe but is the first book to explore how transformations of the built environment can offer a lens into broader processes of state formation and social change.
Author: Seth Howes
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 1640140689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking-a form that thrived despite having been officially banned-in East German socialism's final years
Author: Greg Dalziel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135044414
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
New communication technology has transformed the way in which news about key events is communicated. For example, in the immediate aftermath of catastrophic events such as the Mumbai attacks or the Japanese tsunami, partial accounts, accurate and inaccurate facts, rumour and speculation are now very rapidly disseminated across the globe, often ahead of official announcements and formal news reporting. Often in such situations rumours take hold, and continue to characterise events even after a more complete, more accurate picture eventually emerges. This book explores how such rumours are created, disseminated and absorbed in the age of the internet and mobile communications. It includes a wide range of examples and, besides considering the overall processes involved, engages with scholarly debates in the field of media and communication studies.
Author: Daniel Little
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783487410
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Philosophy matters for the social sciences. Our world faces ever more complex and hazardous problems and, social science ontology and methods need to be adequate to the changing nature of the social realm. Imagination and new ways of thinking are crucial to the social sciences. Based on Daniel Little's popular blog, this book provides an accessible introduction to the latest developments and debates in the philosophy of social science. Each chapter addresses a leading issue in the philosophy of the social sciences today. Little advocates for an 'actor-centred sociology', endorsing the idea of meso-level causation and proposing a solution to the problem of 'mechanisms or powers?'. The book draws significant conclusions from the facts of complexity and heterogeneity in the social world. The book develops a series of arguments that serve to provide a new framework for the philosophy of social science through deep engagement with social scientists and philosophers in the field. Topics covered include: - the heterogeneity and plasticity of the social world; - the complexity of social causation; - the nuts and bolts of causal mechanisms; - the applicability of the theory of causal powers to the social world; - the intellectual coherence of the perspective of scientific realism in application to social science.
