This article focuses on the structures of humor and joke telling that require particular kinds of attentiveness and particular relationships between speaker and audience, or more specifically, between classmates. First, I will analyze the pedagogical and relational preconditions that are necessary for humor to work. If humor is to work well, the person engaging in humor needs to gauge their interlocutors carefully. I discuss, too, the kinds of listening necessary for listening for the joke, including attentiveness to complex possibilities for (...) meaning. This attentiveness to complexity is linked to curiosity and a willingness to be startled, two qualities that are central to the risk and pleasure of learning discussed by Socrates and Maria Lugones. Examining the place of risk in Socrates’ teaching and the place of serious play in Maria Lugones’ discussion of difference, I suggest that humor can help to illuminate complicities and invite more robust interactions with difference, creating pleasurable encounters to work through difficult social divisions. (shrink)

Sociological studies of culture have made significant progress on conceptual clarification of the concept, while remaining comparatively quiescent on questions of measurement. This study empirically examines internal conflicts (or “infighting”), a ubiquitous phenomenon in political organizing, to propose a “resinous culture framework” that holds promise for redirection. The data comprise 674 newspaper articles and more than 100 archival documents that compare internal dissent across two previously unstudied lesbian and gay Marches on Washington. Analyses reveal that activists use infighting as a (...) vehicle to engage in otherwise abstract definitional debates that provide concrete answers to questions such as who are we and what do we want. The mechanism that enables infighting to concretize these cultural concerns is its coupling with fairly mundane and routine organizational tasks. This mechanism affords one way to release the culture concept, understood here as collective self-definitions, from being “an amorphous, indescribable mist which swirls around society members,” as it was once provocatively described. (shrink)

This article focuses primarily on our research group’s year of preparation before the opening of a new K-7 publicly funded ecological ‘school’ for students aged 5–12. The article begins with a discussion of the reasons for seeking ways to change the values of a culture which fails to confront the consequences of its destructive practices, and for looking for a new approach to ecological education which sees the more-than-human world as an integral part of the learning situation. Five principles are (...) introduced and explained—principles that have grown out of the evolving experience of the research group, and then four ‘slogans’, which have served to guide the ongoing work of development, are described and illustrated. As part of the purpose of this project to change social and cultural values, the change of values within the research group during its ongoing work is also explored. (shrink)

Taking up Kimberlé Crenshaw's conclusion that black feminist theorists seem to continue to find themselves in many ways “speaking into the void” (Crenshaw 2011, 228), even as their works are widely celebrated, I examine intersectionality critiques as one site where power asymmetries and dominant imaginaries converge in the act of interpretation (or cooptation) of intersectionality. That is, despite its current “status,” intersectionality also faces epistemic intransigence in the ways in which it is read and applied. My aim is not to (...) suggest that intersectionality cannot (or should not) be critiqued, nor do I maintain that celebratory applications/interpretations are immune from epistemic distortion when it comes to interpreting intersectionality. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that critiques of intersectionality are one important site to examine hermeneutic marginalization and interpretive violence; the politics of citation; and the impact of dominant expectations or established social imaginaries on meaning-making. In so doing, I aim to consider more fully how entrenched ways of thinking are frequently relied upon to interpret and critique intersectionality, even as these are often the very frameworks that intersectionality theorists have identified as highly problematic tools of misrepresentation, erasure, and violation. This slippage away from intersectionality's outlooks, whether in critical or laudatory contexts, is a pivotal site of epistemic negotiation we must examine more closely. (shrink)

In this essay, I contend that feminist theories of citizenship in the U.S. context must go beyond simply acknowledging the importance of race and grapple explicitly with the legacies of slavery. To sketch this case, I draw upon W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Damnation of Women," which explores the significance for all Americans of African American women's sexual, economic, and political lives under slavery and in its aftermath.

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can (...) provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

American life storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue.Early in his Meditations, Descartes suggests that, at least once, one should set one's epistemic bushel in order, as if beliefs were apples to be sorted. But that is not quite right, even though he uses the image in his replies to the seventh set of objections. Descartes's principal concern is not each and every belief but the ways in which he justifies them. It is thus not a (...) stretch to find a kind of ethics of belief in the Meditations, at least with regard to scientia. (Regarding the epistemic challenges of everyday life, Descartes is quite clear in his synopsis that "no sane person ever seriously doubted these things," i.e., "that there really is .. (shrink)

The recent reception of Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness” in the humanities has affirmed the notion as crucial and pivotal throughout his work. In contrast, its recent reception in the social sciences has tended to reject its centrality and importance. This essay will give general credence to the former position but, more importantly, show why a turn to Rousseau’s conception of amour‐propre may illuminate the importance of “double consciousness” in and for Du Bois’ 1903 work The Souls of Black (...) Folk , despite the fact that he never elaborated on or embraced the notion in work subsequent to SBF’s publication. (shrink)

A civic science curriculum is advocated. We discuss practical mechanisms for (and highlight the possible benefits of) addressing the relationship between scientific knowledge and civic responsibility coextensively with rigorous scientific content. As a strategy, we suggest an in-course treatment of well known (and relevant) historical and contemporary controversies among scientists over science policy or the use of sciences. The scientific content of the course is used to understand the controversy and to inform the debate while allowing students to see the (...) role of scientists in shaping public perceptions of science and the value of scientific inquiry, discoveries and technology in society. The examples of the activism of Linus Pauling, Alfred Nobel and Joseph Rotblat as scientists and engaged citizens are cited. We discuss the role of science professors in informing the social conscience of students and consider ways in which a treatment of the function of science in society may find, coherently, a meaningful space in a science curriculum at the college level. Strategies for helping students to recognize early the crucial contributions that science can make in informing public policy and global governance are discussed. (shrink)

I argue that standard explanations of Du Bois' theory of race inappropriately characterize his view as attempting to provide descriptive criteria for races. Such an interpretation makes it both susceptible to Appiah's circularity objection and alienates it from Du Bois' central project of solidarity—which is the central point of “Conservation.” I propose that we should understand his theory as providing a normative account of race: an attempt to characterize what some races should be in terms of what other races are. (...) In providing such an account I will also show how my interpretation of Du Bois' criteria avoids the circularity objection by making the criteria central to the project of solidarity. Thus, this interpretation avoids what I take to be the two main problems with standard descriptive explanations of Du Bois' criteria. (shrink)

Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure of (...) how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that self-respect constitutes an important value, and further, serves as an important basis for equality. I also argue that under conditions of inequality-producing segregation, voluntary separation in schooling may be more likely to provide the resources necessary for self respect. Accordingly, I defend a prima facie case of voluntary separation for stigmatized minorities when equality – as equal status and treatment – is not an option under either the terms of integration or involuntary segregation.

John McKnight's The Careless Society tellingly exposes the ways the professionalized welfare state creates dependency. But McKnight is too quick to condemn this result as the product of professional self‐interest, and to posit as the alternative a selfless, republican model of community. He overlooks the more realistic possibility that the pursuit of their interests by social groups empowered to take care of themselves would better serve those interests, and would simultaneously create a feeling of interdependence and civic responsibility.

I distinguish between two senses in which feminists have argued that the knower is social: 1. situated or socially positioned and 2. interdependent. I argue that these two aspects of the knower work in cooperation with each other in a way that can produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a type of epistemic injustice absent from Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice. Analyzing the limitations of Fricker's analysis of the trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird with attention to the (...) way in which situatedness and interdependence work in tandem, I develop an understanding of willful hermeneutical ignorance, which occurs when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally. Such refusals allow dominantly situated knowers to misunderstand, misinterpret, and/or ignore whole parts of the world. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

Making sense of soul and Sabbath necessitates understanding these phenomena experientially and then suggesting “biochemical” or empirical analogues. Soul, which is defined as the core or essence of a person (or group), includes a working memory of personally purposeful behavior. The states of the soul are reflected in the states of the mind and their physiological correlates-the states of the brain. Such uniqueness appears similar to the biblical cycle of creation-Sabbath-consciousness and its analogue in the biorhythm of brain-mind-that is, waking (...) and work, sleeping and rest, dreaming (rapid eye movement [REM]) and the reorganization-integration process that is ever making sense of our senses by synthesizing what they mean to us. Working memory and biorhythm, therefore, are crucial for the making of meaning, and meaning is the making of soul. (shrink)

In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins , I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as transactional flourishing, and the preservation of racial and ethnic categories.

I address the problem of how to locate "traitorous" subjects, or those who belong to dominant groups yet resist the usual assumptions and practices of those groups. I argue that Sandra Harding's description of traitors as insiders, who "become marginal" is misleading. Crafting a distinction between "privilege-cognizant" and "privilege-evasive" white scripts, I offer an alternative account of race traitors as privilege-cognizant whites who refuse to animate expected whitely scripts, and who are unfaithful to worldviews whites are expected to hold.

An empirical study of whether the ordinary conception of race in the United States is biological or social, and how different conceptions connect to racism.

: Contemporary common sense holds that authenticity is an ethical ideal: that there is something bad about inauthenticity, and something good about authenticity. Here we criticize the view that authenticity is bad because it detracts from the wellbeing of the inauthentic person, and propose an alternative moral account of the badness of inauthenticity, based on the idea that inauthentic behaviour is potentially misleading.

Real kinds or categories, according to conventional wisdom, enter into lawlike generalizations, while nominal kinds do not. Thus, gold but not jewelry is a real kind. However, by such a criterion, few if any kinds or systems of classification employed in the social science are real, for the social sciences offer, at best, only restricted generalizations. Thus, according to conventional wisdom, race and class are on a par with telephone area codes and postal zones; all are nominal rather than real. (...) I propose an account of real kinds that recognizes the current reality of race but not zip codes and shows how a kind can be both constructed and real. One virtue of such an understanding of realism is the light shed on our current practice of racial classification. Race is not a real biological kind but neither is race a myth or illusion. However, the question of whether a social kind is real is separate from whether the category is legitimate. W. E. B. Du Bois maintained that while there are no biological races, race is real and should be conserved. My aim, in this paper, is not to argue for the legitimacy or conservation of race but to defend Du Bois's idea that kinds of people can be both made up and real and provide an understanding of realism that does justice to the social sciences. (shrink)

This article is the keynote address of the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados, philosophy symposium in celebration of the 200th Anniversary of the British outlawing the Atlantic Slave Trade. The paper explores questions of enslavement and freedom through challenges of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of social change, and metacritical reflections posed by African Diasporic or Africana philosophy. Such challenges include the relevance and legitimacy of philosophical reflection to the lives of racialized slaves and concludes with a discussion (...) of the implications of the analysis for an understanding of the “face” of political life and the importance of the concept of “home” for a cogent theory of freedom. (shrink)

Race and religion are integral parts of bioethics. Harm and oppression, with the aim of social and political control, have been wrought in the name of religion against Blacks and people of color as embodied in the Ten Commandments, the Inquisition, and in the history of the Holy Crusades. Missionaries came armed with Judeo/Christian beliefs went to nations of people of color who had their own belief systems and forced change and caused untold harms because the indigenous belief systems were (...) incompatible with their own. The indigenous people were denounced as ungodly, pagan, uncivilized, and savage. Hence, laws were enacted because of their perceived need to structure a sense of morality and to create and build a culture for these indigenous people of color. To date bioethics continues to be informed by a Western worldview that is Judeo/Christian in belief and orientation. However, missing from bioethical discourse in America is the historical influence of the Black Church as a cultural repository, which continues to influence the culture of Africans and Blacks. Cultural aspects of peoples of color are still largely ignored today. In attempting to deal with issues of race while steering clear of the religious and cultural impact of the Black Church, bioethics finds itself in the middle of a distressing situation: it simply cannot figure out what to do with race. (shrink)

: This essay considers whether liberal political theory has tools with which to count gender, and so gender relations, as political. Can liberal political theory count subordination among the harms of sex inequality that the state ought to correct? Watson defends a version of deliberative democracy—liberalism—as able to place issues of social inequality in the form of hierarchical social identities at the center of its normative commitments, and so at the center of securing justice.

: In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins (Sullivan 2001), I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as transactional flourishing, and the preservation of racial and ethnic (...) categories. (shrink)

: This paper questions the connection between vaginas and feminist embodiment in The Vagina Monologues and considers how the text both challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism. I use the Intersex Society of North America's critique as a point of departure and argue that the text offers theorists and activists in feminist, queer, and disability communities an opportunity to understand how power operates in both dominant discourses that degrade vaginas and strategies of feminist resistance (...) that seek to reclaim and celebrate them. (shrink)

It has been suggested that our experiences of embodiment in general appear to constitute an experiential ground for dualist philosophy and that this is particularly so with experiences of dissociation, in which one feels estranged from one’s body. Thus, Drew Leder argues that these play “a crucial role in encouraging and supporting Cartesian dualism” as they “seem to support the doctrine of an immaterial mind trapped inside an alien body”. In this paper I argue that as dualism does not capture (...) the character of such experiences there is not even an apparent separation of self and body revealed here and that one’s body is experienced as uncanny rather than alien. The general relationship between our philosophical theorizing and the phenomenology of lived experience is also considered. (shrink)

Like lynching and other mass hysterias, xenophobia exemplifies a contagious, collective wave of energy and hedonic quality that can point toward a troubling unpredictability at the core of political and social systems. While earlier studies of mass hysteria and popular discourse assume that cooler heads (aka rational individuals with their logic) could and should regain control over those emotions that are deemed irrational, and that boundaries are assumed healthy only when intact, affect studies pose individuals as nodes of biosocial networks (...) larger than themselves. Thus rather than suggesting that the individual can only prevent societal harm by gaining command and patrolling the borders of an autonomous self, we embrace the notion that affects can exert a positive and transformative force on a social reality that is resistant to top-down policy intervention and any straightforward moral or logical plea. (shrink)

This article examines the extent to which diversity characteristics and stakeholder role influence individuals’ corporate social orientation (CSO). Our findings indicate that one’s relationship to the organization as well as diversity, gender, and race influence one’s CSO. Specifically, we found that employees’ greatest concern was economic whereas customers had a stronger ethical orientation. The results also suggest that women as well as Black employees and customers place more emphasis on whether an organization is fulfilling its discretionary responsibilities than do males (...) and Whites. A model using the concept of value congruence is presented to guide future research. (shrink)

The author introduces the existential psychology of the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. The article describes several theoretical ideas and perceptual metaphors derived from Frankl’s scholarship that make it useful as a philosophical and historical underpinning for the practice of autoethnography. Frankl asserted that each individual’s disposition, situation, and position work together to create a uniquely valuable and incommutable individual perspective. This incommutability suggests that the value of autoethnographic social science is based on the opportunities derived from the (...) particular, not the general. Frankl’s work also demonstrates that transsubjectivity is best facilitated when several autoethnographers take advantage of their unique combinations of disposition, situation and position rather than when a single autoethnographer tries to move into multiple positions simultaneously. Psychologists who publish autoethnography may find Frankl’s ideas and metaphors useful for conceptualizing and defending their own scholarship. (shrink)

Booker T. Washington (1856?1915), Principal of Tuskegee Institute, delivered an electrifying oration at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895. He drew cheers from white elites in the segregated audience, as also admiration, initially, from many blacks. Washington's ?Atlanta Compromise? speech unilaterally volunteered forfeiture of black political rights in the hope of white endorsement of limited black access to the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Washington's specific program ? prioritising work, vocational education, racial self?help etc. over any quest for political rights (...) ? was not original. His enigmatic ability to sell these notions to mutually opposed constituencies was startling. As Washington quickly rose to become one of the most powerful figures in America, the fortunes of his people, over the same period, spiralled away into the depths. The great imbalance between gain and loss in the ?Compromise? prompts the question whether or in what degree Washington ever shed a ?slave mentality? early imposed by violence and indoctrination. (shrink)

Anna Julia Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South is a hybrid text that speaks provocatively to contemporary feminist philosophy. Negotiating exclusionary categories of being and knowing and writing herself into intellectual traditions meant to exclude her, Cooper's narrative methods are politically tactical and epistemologically significant. Cooper inserts subjectivity into objective analysis and underscores knowledge as located and embodied. By speaking from spaces of exclusion, Cooper fully articulates the promise of intersectional approaches to liberation.

The use of African American as a new denomination for a group previously referred to as Black has rapidly become standard practice in American society. This paper analyzes how the introduction of African American in our ordinary language marks the elaboration of a new social reality. As the concept becomes part of our social life, it is transformed into a real “phenomenon” of social representation that formalizes behaviour and orients communication. Such a transformation requires that the new term infiltrates people's (...) everyday lives sufficiently to concretize it into a common reality. The analysis presented here outlines three key processes in the emergence and formation of the social representation of African American. The first one is anchoring which familiarizes the new object by linking it with preexisting categories in our minds. The second process is objectification which assures the crystallization of the object. A figurative core is created to allow the projection of images. At this point people can talk about the object, and through communication the object takes on meaning. This naturalization is the third process to conclude the transformation of the object into a social reality. These steps have allowed African American to become the carrier for a modification of cognitions and broadening of attitudes concerning the group. (shrink)

In this paper, we locate a general rhetorical strategy employed in theoretical discourse wherein philosophers argue from the mere existence of internalized oppression to some kind of epistemic, moral, political, or cognitive deficiency of oppressed people. We argue that this strategy has harmful consequences for oppressed people, breaking down our analysis in terms of individual and structural harms within both epistemic and moral domains. These harms include attempting to undermine the self-trust of oppressed people, reinforcing unjust epistemic power hierarchies, undermining (...) the moral agency of oppressed people, and obscuring real issues of oppression. In light of these many harms, we conclude that there are pro tanto reasons not to employ this strategy, and instead offer a series of suggestions for those considering adopting such a rhetorical move. (shrink)

This essay argues that a black radical Kantianism proposes a Kantian theory of justice in the circumstances of injustice. First, I describe BRK’s method of political critique and explain how it builds on Kant’s republicanism. Second, I argue that Kant’s original account of public right is incomplete because it neglects that a situated citizenry’s adoption of an ideal contributes to its refinement. Lastly, with the aid of W.E.B. Du Bois’s analysis of American Reconstruction and his proposal of an “abolition democracy,” (...) I offer my refined universalizable standard for political critique. Du Bois reconceptualizes the requirements of justice to protect the political liberties and productive powers of black freedmen and the working poor. While originating with the political demands of black freedmen during the Reconstruction era, the universal protection of political liberties and productive powers offers a novel public standard for political judgment that should still anchor deliberation today. (shrink)

To highlight the promise of Jordan Pascoe’s Kant’s Theory of Labour, my comments concern the diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions of the book’s excellent intersectional critique of dependent labour relations. The diagnostic dimension of Pascoe’s critique establishes that the organisation of dependent labour relations is a neglected problem of Kantian justice. The prescriptive dimension offers solutions to this problem but is underdeveloped. To enhance the book’s prescriptive dimension, I draw on the noted Africana philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois for guidance. (...) For Du Bois, a constitutional republic ought to strive for the abolition of a ‘second’ slavery following the abolition of de jure black chattel slavery with the end of the American Civil War. Given Du Bois’ call for meaningful Emancipation, I argue that philosophers should reinterpret the Kantian normative ideal of freedom as universal independence to uproot the postbellum conditions of second slavery. (shrink)

In the last two decades, a robust consensus has emerged among philosophers of science, whereby political, ethical, or social values must play some role in scientific inquiry, and that the ‘value-free ideal’ is thus a misguided conception of science. However, the question of how to distinguish, in a principled way, which values may legitimately influence science remains. This question, which has been dubbed the ‘new demarcation problem,’ has until recently received comparatively less attention from philosophers of science. In this paper, (...) I appeal to Rawls’s theory of justice (1971) on the basis of which I defend a Rawlsian solution to the new demarcation problem. As I argue, the Rawlsian solution places plausible constraints on which values ought to influence scientific inquiry, and, moreover, can be fruitfully applied to concrete cases to determine how the conflicting interests of stakeholders should be balanced. After considering and responding to the objection that Rawls’s theory of justice applies only to the “basic structure” of society, I compare the Rawlsian solution to some other approaches to the new demarcation problem, especially those that emphasize democratic criteria. (shrink)

This book is a systematic treatment-perhaps the first-of “attitudes of the heart”-remorse (versus guilt), love, trust, gratitude, personal anger (versus righteous anger), jealousy, and others-and their role in mediating personal relationship, attachment, and connection. This is obviously interesting in its own right, but it also shows how heartfelt attitudes mirror more extensively studied “reactive attitudes” of guilt, resentment, and blame (“attitudes of the will”). Whereas the latter mediate moral relations of mutual respect and accountability, attitudes of the heart are the (...) currency of heartfelt connection and personal relationship. (shrink)

Scholars have paid limited attention to the crucial relationship between Hegel's racism, his support for colonialism and his views on religion. This essay offers a critical reconstruction of how race and coloniality shape the question of religion (and vice versa) throughout Hegel's attempts to critique and ultimately vindicate European modernity. Paying special attention to the seminal role of ‘fetishism’ in his works, I argue that Hegel's intellectual concerns are racialized from the inception of his project. I conclude by suggesting an (...) alternative philosophical approach to the concept of the ‘fetish’ and ‘fetishism’ to resist Hegel's racist and pro-colonial tendencies. (shrink)

This article identifies two tendencies in left-wing approaches toward the social sciences. The first expresses skepticism towards science as a kind of product of the ruling ideology that solely reproduces the status quo. The second worries about the capacity of scientific inquiry to actually change people's ingrained beliefs and prejudices. Antonio Gramsci and W.E.B. Du Bois are representative of these two diverging approaches. Their views on science, however, offer more commonalities than at first meet the eye. They are both critical (...) of sociological traditions that seek to discover universal laws of society, arguing that such an approach fails to grasp the complexity of causality and the role of human action in shaping their lives and history. On the other hand, both see the potential for rigorous and nuanced scientific analysis to offer grounds for concrete action and warn off wishful thinking. By combining their views, this article presents a conception of the role and potential of social scientific inquiry for progressive movements toward social change that navigates between the double-sided concerns represented by Gramsci and Du Bois. (shrink)

The late Charles W. Mills achieved public renown in North America and around the world that academics seldom achieve. His untimely death from cancer in 2021 was reported by The New York Times, Nati...