This useful essay in the Hedgehog review links the contemporary flourishing of realism to the politics of ‘post-truth’, making a change from crass accusations that trump is the fault of postmodernism. While his focus is on speculative, critical and new realism, the point could be generalised to include new materialism, agential realism, ANT and assemblage […]
Tag: realism
How can we reconcile the psychoanalytical and the reflexive? One way is to deny there’s a tension and the work of someone like Ian Craib illustrates how this can be so, excavating reflexivity as a site of fantasy that is itself acted on reflexively. We find the image of a powerful and boundless self intoxicating […]
Rarely can a film have been as timely as Denial. It tells the story of the libel action the holocaust denying historian David Irving took against Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher, alleging that she had damaged his professional reputation as a historian by claiming he had wilfully distorted evidence. The film recounts the events leading up to the trial, […]
Get in touch ASAP if you’d like a place – there will be a workshop session by Margaret Archer, a number of paper presentations & a chance for extensive discussion with others using the morphogenetic approach.
International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) 19th Annual Conference Wednesday 20 – Friday 22 July 2016 Pre-conference workshop: Monday 18 – Tuesday 19 July 2016 Postgraduate Teaching Centre, Cardiff Business School Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU De/humanisation The dehumanisation of contemporary societies In many ways, our current epoch witnesses dehumanised social relations. While alienation (Marx) […]
The International Conference for Critical Realism will be held in Cardiff on 20-22 July 2016. It will be preceded by an optional pre-conference workshop on 18-19 July.This year’s theme is de/humanisation. We welcome contributions from all areas of the humanities and the social sciences. A number of grants will be available for PhD students. Registration […]
Trying to decide whether I should apply for this myself but sharing it here on the assumption that it will be of interest to many of those who read my theory posts: Human Flourishing, Social Solidarity, and Critical Realism Working Group 2016 – 2017 Organizers: William (Beau) Weston (Van Winkle Professor of Sociology, Centre College), Brandon Vaidyanathan […]
I’m trying to put together a comprehensive list of critiques of Margaret Archer’s work. Any help would be appreciated! If you could e-mail me, leave them as a comment or tweet a link then I’ll add them to this list: Defining personal reflexivity: A critical reading of Archer’s approach. European Journal of Social Theory http://est.sagepub.com/content/18/1/60.short Reflexivity as […]
Call for Papers (http://www.maneyonline.com/pb/assets/raw/PRT/REA_special_issue_gender.pdf) Critical Realism, Gender and Feminism Special Issue of the Journal of Critical Realism (15:5, 2016) Edited by Angela Martínez Dy, Lena Gunnarsson and Michiel van Ingen Email: lena.gunnarsson@oru.se<mailto:lena.gunnarsson@oru.se> An increasing number of gender scholars have become familiar with critical realism, finding it a robust alternative to the poststructuralist perspectives that currently dominate […]
Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) March 10th 17.00-18.30, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar takes an alternative tack. Returning to Bhaskar’s formulation of ‘position-practices’, it reviews recent work on organizational routines. Developing a […]
Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough) Tuesday, January 27, 2015 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Prosumption – the unpaid performance of productive work by ‘consumers’ who thus help commercial businesses to generate a profit – is perhaps the most studied of the many hybrid forms of economic practice that have proliferated in […]
Beth Weaver (Strathclyde) Tuesday, February 3rd 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper discusses my empirical application of a relational realist analytic framework to illuminate the role of social groups or collectives, as social relations, in shaping and affecting outcomes for individuals and for groups. Using the morphogenetic sequence […]
In the second Centre for Social Ontology seminar of 2014/15, Emma Uprichard(Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies) discusses Complex Temporal Ontologies and Method: This paper reflects on the methodological challenge of applying complexity theory to study social systems. More specifically, the focus is on the problem of capturing complex patterns of time and temporality empirically. […]
In a recent paper Tero Piiroinen suggests that “if we all just suddenly lost our memories and other relevant neural dispositions—if no one was able to remember his or her own name, let alone relatives, friends, possessions, occupation, place of residence, and so on—there would be nothing left of social relations and structures”. This is a science fiction scenario […]
See the full interview here: What has changed most in higher education in the past 10 years? Bureaucratic incursion, expressed through the regulation of funding, reward and recognition for departments and individuals, via performance indicators and sanctions. Their consequences are completely negative: collegiality becomes competition; informal esteem becomes a formal hierarchy; concern for students becomes […]
The Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) was established in 2011 at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Now based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, its main focus is the Morphogenetic Project. The Morphogenetic Project produces an annual volume as part of the Social Morphogenesis series. The first two volumes in this series are Social Morphogenesis and Late Modernity: […]
I hadn’t realised this was still online. It’s a very useful resource: Absence Actualism Change Closed and Open Systems Completion Constellation Critique and Transcendental Argument Determinism Dialectics Differentiation and Stratification Emergence Epistemic and Ontic Fallacies Epistemic Relativism and Judgmental Rationality Ethical Naturalism and Moral Realism Explanation Fact-Value Facts Laws Metaphysics Ontological Extensionalism Ontological Monovalence Reasons […]
At last year’s International Association for Critical Realism conference, I saw perhaps the most impressive conference presentation I’d witnessed in my five or six years of going to conferences regularly. Jamie Morgan demolished the notion of ‘norm circles’ offered by Dave Elder-Vass and he did so in a way which made a whole host of important meta-theoretical […]
I’m finally reading Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive by C Wright Mills. As I expected I don’t actually like it very much. I have a strange relationship to Mills, in that I find him an inspiring figure but I’m not particularly interested in his work. In this case, I don’t accept the methodological premise that social […]
