Scholars have argued that transnational networks of right-wing economists and activists caused the worldwide embrace of neoliberalism. Using the case of an Italian think tank, CESES, associated with these networks, the author shows that the origins of neoliberalism were not in hegemony but in liminality. At CESES, the Italian and American right sought to convert Italians to free market values by showing them how Soviet socialism worked. However, CESES was created in liminal spaces that opened up within and between Soviet (...) socialism and Western capitalism after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Scholars from East and West at CESES developed new knowledge about actually existing socialism, which, due to the shifting context of the Cold War, seemed to provoke left-wing sympathies among the scholars and the students involved. CESES in fact required left-wing scholars, who had necessary skills and a fascination with a common project of democratic or market socialism, to create this new knowledge. The new knowledge that developed out of an East–West dialogue not only helped right-wing transnational networks to reorient their hegemonic projects, but also helped those on the left to understand actually existing socialism and what socialism might become. This knowledge could not be obtained without this dialogue and had to travel through liminal spaces. (shrink)

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and incorporating insights from feminist and critical race and legal scholarship on the creation of “subjugated knowledge,” this article investigates the dispositional production of perceptions of injustice, politics, and morality among differently situated members of a subordinated population. Based on ethnographic fieldwork within and across the West Bank and the Israeli city of Lod, I track how the political rhetoric that Lod Palestinians use to describe key issues in their lives—for example, drug use and (...) dealing, and poor formal education—differs from the moral judgments through which West Bank Palestinians, who have moved to the city and remain there precariously, interpret the same issues. This article traces this interpretive divergence to two dispositional formations: one that has emerged under protracted conditions of denigration, criminalization, and surveillance in Lod and the other that has been produced over time by military rule in the West Bank and imported to Lod by West Bank Palestinians who moved there. It concludes by calling attention to the role of dispositions in studies of identity-formation and boundary-work as well as issues of submission and resistance in contexts of subordination. (shrink)

When reading the papers of Solomon, Thagard and Goldman, I observed their framing doing considerable explicit and implicit work. Framing, a visual metaphor, stimulated me to respond with images of one kind or another. These should allow readers to visualize more issues and propositions than an argumentive format could have pinned down in the limited space available.Figure 1 conveys how the three papers seem to me to frame the issue of integrating the cognitive and social: Scientists’beliefsare the focal phenomena, within (...) three nested boxesof factorssurrounding them: thinking (reasoning etc.); cognition (information input and processing); and social (interaction among agents). (The other objects and lines will be explained in due course.) These factors are referred to asinfluences,something outside that gets into beliefs (1). The authors then argue about which set of influences is strongest or how to think about the factors “intermingling,” “overlapping,” “interacting.”. (shrink)

The recent rapprochement between Science and Technology Studies and Political Science is induced by the broadened understanding of political action. The debate concerning the nature of ``the political'' produces an important question concerning the possibilities of an issue- or object-oriented focus for understanding political action. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this debate through an analysis of how relations between material and social entities are continuously recontextualized and decontextualized in social and political interaction. The authors discuss established (...) approaches to explain the concept of virtualization. Virtualization is then used in a case study on the implementation of manure regulation in East Fryslân, the Netherlands, to illustrate how cases or issues are virtualized in political decision making, which produces initial presumptions that carry conclusive weight. The authors conclude that a broad understanding of the political in both STS and PS can only be sustained through an understanding of how relations between social and material entities are continuously decontextualized and recontextualized in political and social interaction. (shrink)