Feminist standpoint theory remains highly controversial: it is widely advocated, used to guide research and justify its results, and yet is also vigorously denounced. This essay argues that three such sites of controversy reveal the value of engaging with standpoint theory as a way of reflecting on and debating some of the most anxiety-producing issues in contemporary Western intellectual and political life. Engaging with standpoint theory enables a socially relevant philosophy of science.

The influence of liberal political ideology on nursing sciencePrevious notions of science as impartial and value-neutral have been refuted by contemporary views of science as influenced by social, political and ideological values. By locating nursing science in the dominant political ideology of liberalism, the author examines how nursing knowledge is influenced by liberal philosophical assumptions. The central tenets of liberal political philosophy — individualism, egalitarianism, freedom, tolerance, neutrality, and a free-market economy — are primarily manifested in relation to: (i) the (...) individualistic focus of our science; (ii) our view of society as essentially egalitarian and equitable; (iii) our preference for politically neutral knowledge development, and (iv) an economy of knowledge development that supports rather than challenges the status quo. I argue that exposing, rather than ignoring, the liberal ideological values inherent in nursing science will render these assumptions open to debate, stimulate ongoing development of critically oriented knowledge, and increase our capacity to influence the social, political and economic determinants of health. (shrink)

Western ideology takes biology as the cause, and behavior and social statuses as the effects, and then proceeds to construct biological dichotomies to justify the “naturalness” of gendered behavior and gendered social statuses. What we believe is what we see—two sexes producing two genders. The process, however, goes the other way: gender constructs social bodies to be different and unequal. The content of the two sets of constructed social categories, “females and males” and “women and men,” is so varied that (...) their use in research without further specification renders the results spurious. (shrink)

This article proposes that the urgent task for feminist sociology is to recuperate those lost or residual `body matters' which lurk, unattended to, on the sidelines of the social. Feminist sociology must carefully negotiate the complex space between sociality and corporeality. The new feminist philosophies of the body tend sometimes to grate against this project by valorizing the body but de-valorizing gender. The new sociology of the body is recuperating the body within sociology, but pays insufficient attention to the ways (...) in which gendered bodies have always enjoyed varying degrees of absence or presence in the sociological imaginary - in the guise of `female corporeality' and `male embodiment'. By revisiting the classical texts of sociology, such as those of Durkheim, Weber and particularly Simmel, I explore the textual strategies whereby `the body' and `the social' were dissociated in the first place and how, simultaneously, woman is saturated with, while man is divested of, corporeality and she is divested while he is invested with sociality. The absent women in sociology were the women in the body excluded from the social. It is male bodies which animate the social - they appear for a fleeting moment, only to disappear immediately, in the space between `corporeality' and `sociality'. Thus, it is not simply a case of recuperating bodies into the social, but of excavating the gendered subtexts whereby gendered bodies were differently inscribed into and out of the social in the first place. The crucial point here is not the more familiar story of her saturation with corporeality but the less familiar one of what happened to his body - how, that is, did male sociologists effect the disappearance of their own bodies in the textual strategies of sociology? (shrink)

The aim of the article is to further assess and develop feminist standpoint theory by introducing the notion of the `situated imagination' as constituting an important part of this theory as well as that of `situated knowledge'. The article argues that the faculty of the imagination constructs as well as transforms, challenges and supersedes both existing knowledge and social reality. However, like knowledge, it is crucial to theorize the imagination as situated, that is, as shaped and conditioned (although not determined) (...) by social positioning. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to add to the research surrounding nurses' work in hospitals. Throughout history, nurses have faced adverse working conditions, an aspect of their work that remains remarkably unchanged today. Prevailing historical ideologies and sociopolitical conditions influences the context of nurses' work in contemporary hospitals. This research revealed how ruling patriarchal power and nurses' altruistic ways normalize the conditions in hospitals as nurses' work. Moving discourses further add to the work of nurses in hospitals. For example, (...) cost containment strategies, overcapacity and short staffing have resulted in practices to accommodate these problems. While contemporary hospitals may look different, clearly, inside, little has changed since the early days; hospital issues have clearly become an ordinary part of nurses' work. This article discusses how the conditions in hospitals have become an ordinary part of nurses' work. The research in this article emphasizes how prevailing ideologies and institutional discourses make invisible and taken‐for‐granted, how this normalizing of nurses' work contributes to sustaining the hospital's power. (shrink)

Recent debates between modernists and postmodernists have shaken the foundations of modern social science. The epistemological assumptions of long-established procedures for constructing and validating knowledge claims have been called into question. This article discusses how two major contributors to the “new feminist epistemologies”—Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins—selectively integrate premises of modernist and postmodernist thought into their standpoint approaches. However, the particular premises they select result in significant ontological and epistemological differences between their works. These differences reflect major controversies over (...) materialism versus idealism, as well as essentialism versus diversity. As such, these different standpoints have important implications for feminist scholarship and political practice. (shrink)

This paper challenges nurses to join together as a collective in order to facilitate ongoing analysis of the issues that arise for nurses and patients when nursing care is harnessed for health care efficiencies. It is a call for nurses to respond with a collective strategy through which we can ‘talk back’ and ‘act back’ to the powerful rationality of current thinking and practices. The paper uses examples from an institutional ethnographic (IE) research project to demonstrate how dominant approaches to (...) understanding nursing position nurses to overlook how we activate practices of reform that reorganize how we nurse. The paper then describes two classroom strategies taken from my work with students in undergraduate and graduate programs. The teaching strategies I describe rely on the theoretical framework that underpin the development of an IE analysis. Taken into the classroom (or into other venues of nursing activism) the tools of IE can be adapted to inform a pedagogical approach that supports nurses to develop an alternate analysis to what is happening in our work. (shrink)

The article argues that Marx’s use of the concept of ideology in The German Ideology is incidental to a sustained critique of how those he described as the German ideologists think and reason about society and history and that this critique is not simply of an idealist theory that represents society and history as determined by consciousness but of methods of reasoning that treat concepts, even of those of political economy, as determinants. His view of how consciousness is determined historically (...) by our social being does not envisage some kind of mechanical transfer of class status to class consciousness. Rather, he works with an epistemology that takes the concepts foundational to political economy as expressions or reflections of the social relations of a mode of production. The difference between ideology and science is the difference between treating those concepts as the primitives of theory and treating them as sites for exploring the social relations that are expressed in them. Thus, the historical rather than further undermining claims to knowledge, provides both the conditions under which knowledge is possible and its limitations. (shrink)

That women tend to see harassment where men see harmless fun or normal gendered interaction is one of the more robust findings in sexual harassment research. Using in-depth interviews with employed men and women, this article argues that these differences may be partially explained by the performative requirements of masculinity. The ambiguous practice of “girl watching” is centered, and the production of its meaning analyzed. The data suggest that men's refusal to see their behavior as harassing may be partially explained (...) through the objectification and attenuated empathy that the production of masculine identities may require. Thus, some forms of harassment and their interpretations may more accurately be seen as acts of ignoring than states of ignorance. Implications for anti-sexual harassment policies and training are explored. (shrink)

This article introduces an interpretative approach to the analysis of situations in computational settings called situational analytics. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this approach, which is still under development, and show how it can be used to surface situations from large data sets derived from online platforms such as YouTube. Situational analytics extends to computationally-mediated settings a qualitative methodology developed by Adele Clarke, Situational Analysis, which uses data mapping to detect heterogeneous entities in fieldwork data to determine (...) ‘what makes a difference’ in a situation. Situational analytics scales up this methodology to analyse situations latent in computational data sets with semi-automated methods of textual and visual analysis. I discuss how this approach deviates from recent analyses of situations in computational social science, and argue that Clarke’s framework renders tractable a fundamental methodological problem that arises in this area of research: while social researchers turn to computational settings in order to analyse social life, the social processes unfolding in these envirnoments are fundamentally affected by the computational architectures in which they occur. Situational analytics offers a way to address this problematic by making a heterogeneously composed situation – involving social, technical and media elements – the unit of computational analysis. To conclude, I show how situational analytics can be applied in a case study of YouTube videos featuring intelligent vehicles and discuss how situational analysis itself needs to be elaborated if we are to come to terms with computational transformations of the situational fabric of social life. (shrink)

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith's wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith's conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative (...) sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society's ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. (shrink)

This article explores how the intersections of gendered, racialized and neoliberal dynamics reproduce social inequality and shape the violence that nurses face. Grounded in the interviews and focus groups conducted with a purposeful sample of 17 registered nurses (RNs) and registered practical nurses (RPNs) currently working in Ontario's mental health sector, our analysis underscores the need to move beyond reductionist notions of violence as simply individual physical or psychological events. While acknowledging that violence is a very real and disturbing experience (...) for individual nurses, our article casts light on the importance of a broader, power structure analysis of violence experienced by nurses in this sector, arguing that effective redress lies beyond blame shifting between clients/patients and nurses. Our analysis illustrates how assumptions about gender, race and care operate in the context of global, neoliberal forces to reinforce, intensify and create, as well as obscure, structural violence through mechanisms of individualization and normalization. (shrink)

A contribution to management philosophy is made here by the development of a postcolonial-storytelling theory, created by drawing together parallel developments in quantum physics and tribal peoples’ storytelling. We argue that these developments resituate the hegemonic relationship of discursive representationalism over material storytelling practices. Implications are two-fold. First, this dissolves inherent dualisms presumed in the concept of interactionamong entities like actor–structure, subject–object and discursive–nondiscursive in favour of a profound ontology of entanglement and intra-action of materiality and discourse, where storytelling is (...) a domain of this discourse. Second, postcolonial phenomena are understood as results of entangled genealogies in which plural voices are present. This implies an understanding and awareness of the intra-action of imperial narratives and material storytelling and antenarrative resistance, and thus the resistance and contestation to imperial and colonising monologic narratives of spatial and temporal alignment. (shrink)

Despite the considerable body of scholarship and practice on interconnected systems of dominance and its effects on women in different social locations, Chicanas remain “outside the frame” of mainstream academic feminist dialogues. This article provides an overview of the contributions of Chicana intersectional thought, research, and activism. We highlight four major scholarly areas of contribution: borders, identities, institutional inequalities, and praxis. Although not a full mapping of the Chicana/latina presence in intersectionality, it proffers the distinctive features and themes defining the (...) intersectional terrain of Chicana feminism. (shrink)

Clerical frames for nursing practice: missionary nurses at Rehoboth This paper presents a discourse analysis of publications of the Christian Reformed Church regarding its Rehoboth Mission near Gallup, New Mexico, among the Navajo. All issues of The Banner, Acts of Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, the Rehoboth Hospital Bulletin, and the Annual Report of the Rehoboth Mission from 1880 to the present were reviewed for references to health‐care at Rehoboth from 1903 to 1943. Four religiously framed discourses were identified: (...) discourses justifying provision of health‐care at the mission, discourses of the Navajos as immature and potentially dangerous, needing to be civilized, discourses of cleanliness, and discourses of calling. This paper adds to a growing body of knowledge about religious frames within which nurses have practiced in North America. (shrink)

‘Patient satisfaction’: Knowledge for ruling hospital reform — An institutional ethnography Driven by funding restraint, Canadian health‐care has undergone over a decade of significant reform. Hospitals are being restructured, as text‐based practices of accountability bring a new business‐orientation into hospital and clinical management. New forms of knowledge, generated through records of various sorts, are a necessary resource for managing care in the new environment. This paper's research uses Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith's institutional ethnographic methodology to critically analyse one instance (...) of text‐based management. I analyse information about ‘patient satisfaction’ as it is generated through a patient survey (in which I was implicated through my involvement with a hospitalized family member). Subsequently, I have studied the management environment into which that information would be entered. I argue that in the instance analysed, the information becomes part of a dominant consumer oriented healthcare discourse that subordinates concerns about ‘what actually happened’ as a professional caregiver would have known it. On this basis, I contend that this sort of taken‐for‐granted approach to making decisions about quality care in hospitals may be seriously, even dangerously, flawed. (shrink)

Some proponents of epistemological approaches to argumentation assume that it should be possible to develop non-relative criteria of argument evaluation. By contrast, this paper argues that any evaluation of an argument depends on the cognitive situation of the evaluator, on background knowledge that is available for this evaluator in a certain situation, and --in some cases--on the belief-value-system this person shares.

VAN MOSSEL C, ALFORD M and WATSON H. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 278–289 Challenges of patient‐centred care: practice or rhetoric.

This paper examines whether social workers and other direct service practitioners can find utility in ethnomethodology despite or even because of the policy of “indifference”. Garfinkel, the father of ethnomethodology, sets out “ethnomethodological indifference” to insist that EM studies do not supplement, formulate remedies, develop humanistic arguments, or encourage discussions of theory. While at first blush such limits on EM might appear to be a barrier for most social workers this paper argues against first impressions. It is argued that EM (...) provides an important redirection for social work practice and research. Additionally, it is proposed that by approaching EM through Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography social workers can bridge Garfinkel’s quest for haeccities with extended social relations and actual courses of actions to find congruence between EM and accomplished professional practice. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Standpoint Logic: Origins A Philosophy of Method Notes.

: This response seeks to pick up on the key questions and concerns raised by Nancy C. M. Hartsock and Karen Houle in their critiques of The Spectacle of Violence. I mold my response around two emotions that are never far from the question of violence: fear and hope. Is it fear of ambiguity that stops us from delicately blending the experiential with the discursive, the nodal with the circular, the corporeal with the epistemic, or the oppressive with the constitutive? (...) If so, we can only hope that the power of such ambivalence lies in its ability to unsettle these treasured lines of force. (shrink)

Women's community participation re community and identity. In this article, the author explores the collective identities that are built around motherhood, rape-crisis work, Latino empowerment, and political activism for 39 Anglo and 11 Latina women. The reflexive relationship between communities and identities in relation to class background, gender, age, generation, and race-ethnicity are examined. It is argued that women embrace—as well as negotiate—cultural expectations of mothers, homemakers, and elders through their community participation. The author explores work in the community as (...) a venue for women to stretch across class-based interests and race-ethnic identities even while both influence women's community involvements. Finally, the often overlooked relationships between women's community participation and discourses of state responsibility for citizens are considered by indicating ways in which women channel state resources and expand the parameters of the needs and meaning of “community.”. (shrink)

This article explores how textual analysis can help us understand subjectivity as an empirical, rather than purely theoretical, phenomenon. The texts discussed here are advice columns in adolescent magazines; the analysis takes as its starting point girls’ accounts of magazine reading. Drawing on focus group discussions and interviews with 48 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 years, I explore how the accomplishment of ‘individuality’– as a culturally and historically-specific task of adolescence – is mediated by advice texts. Because (...) my analysis directs us to the existence of embodied subjects, I employ the notion of ‘Subject-ivity’. As a concept, ‘Subject-ivity’ reminds the analyst of the presence of an embodied, rather than theoretically constructed Self, brought into existence as a practical mode of consciousness. It thus provides a potential bridge between the sociological world of social subjects and highly theoretical work on subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper examines the attempts of one mainstream women''s organization to organize and include women of color. Using the approach to social organization developed in the work of Dorothy Smith, I aim to make visible the complex of relations within which the work of this organization is embedded. In mapping the institutional relations structuring the activities in a local setting, the concern is to articulate how activities in the local setting are organized by and in relation to others. My analysis (...) takes as its point of departure my work involvements with this organization over a period of two years. Beginning with my own activities and others'' within the setting, the analysis problematizes the concepts of "organizing women of color" and "inclusion/exclusion." What comes into view are the ways in which "organizing" and "inclusion" are ideological constructs brought into service to account for the practices in which various members of the organization were engaged. Their ideological character came to be unveiled in the "troubles" the organization encountered in its attempts to "organize" women of color. The inquiry shows that those troubles arose out of the organization''s location at the juncture between private foundations, grassroots women, and the state. On the one hand, the activities of the organization are articulated to an understanding of what funders might be willing to support, and on the other hand the organization''s activities have to be seen as serving women of color by both women of color and others. Displayed through the mapping of institutional relations is the deep mismatch between the institutional characterization of what it means to be "organized" and the actual activities women of color were engaged in. I argue that the activities and practices of the mainstream organization embedded in a complex of relations with funding agencies, public policy makers and so on actually produce the definition of women of color as "unorganized.". (shrink)

Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud provided powerful accounts of systematic interested ignorance. Fifty years ago, Anglo-American philosophies of science stigmatized Marx's and Freud's analyses as models of irrationality. They remain disvalued today, at a time when virtually all other humanities and social science disciplines have returned to extract valuable insights from them. Here the argument is that there are reasons distinctive to philosophy why such theories were especially disvalued then and why they remain so today. However, there are even better (...) reasons today for philosophy to break from this history and find more fruitful ways to engage with systematic interested ignorance. (shrink)

Violence is a spectacle. Not because it is simply something that we observe but, more fundamentally, because it is a mechanism through which we observe and define other things. Violence has the capacity to shape the ways that we see, and thereby come to know, these things. In other words, violence is more than a practice that acts upon the bodies of individual subjects to inflict harm and injury. It is, metaphorically speaking, also a way of looking at these subjects.

Immigration medicine and the work carried out by Panel Physicians within the Canadian immigration system give rise to ethically troublesome practices and consequences. In this analysis in three parts, we explore the context of the immigration medical examination, characterize the observed and potential burdens and harms for immigrant and refugee applicants with HIV, and critically assess the possibilities for transforming immigration medical practices and policy to reduce inequities. We use the Code of Ethics of the Canadian Medical Association and the (...) Medical Ethics Manual of the World Medical Association to analyse six practices that fail to meet ethical expectations. This analysis opens up new lines of inquiry into the medico-administrative practices regulating immigration to Canada. It also extends knowledge about the functioning of immigration medical policy and the collection and uses of HIV-related health information. We argue that to reduce burdens and harms to prospective immigrants and refugees to Canada with HIV, changes must occur in how Citizenship and Immigration Canada asks Panel Physicians to work with these applicants. This argument is empirically informed by institutional ethnographic research results of the Canadian immigration system and its treatment of applicants with HIV. (shrink)

Drug testing is widely deployed in the United States throughout the public and private sectors. This case study uses two emergent drug-testing technologies—hair analysis and the sweat patch—as examples of techniques of governance that should be subjected to the political equivalent of strict scrutiny. The article contributes to conceptual debates in science and technology studies, arguing that the study of social structure and subject formation should be integral rather than epiphenomenal to analysis in the transdisciplinary field of science and technology (...) studies. The article contextualizes the development and deployment of drug-testing technologies within the structural and epistemological categories of racial and ethnic difference, gender, sexuality, and class formation. Conflicts between proponents of the technologies and critical advocates who seek to constrain their use mark sites of productive theoretical engagement with structural sociology, racial formation theory, critical race theory, and feminist critique.1 Finally, the article demonstrates how STS analyses can contribute to the struggles of strategic counterpublics as they advocate for changing the meaning and material consequences of suspect technologies. (shrink)

Everyday life as a sociological/philosophical concept is widely considered to be both a familiar and yet taken-for-granted subject matter for analytic investigation. In considering the works of three leading scholars, Michel de Certeau, Harold Garfinkel, and John Fiske, one can look toward possible referents to this term. Starting with Certeau’s critical semiotics of the everyday, with its emphasis on such distinctions as place and space as well as strategies and tactics, the everyday can be theorized in terms of contrasts between (...) discourse and practice. Similarly, with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological emphasis on the practical actor and Fiske’s ethnographic and cultural studies emphasis on local meaning, the everyday can be conceptualized in terms of distinctions between lived order and a theorized version of the everyday. By examining the approaches of these three scholars as well as drawing upon a visual examination of everyday urban scenes, the article concludes with an affirmation of a multi-conceptual and methodological approach to the everyday and with recognition of the everyday as a signifier loaded with a multitude of possibly overlapping meanings. (shrink)

Within the literature that circulates in the discourses organizing nursing education, there are embedded assumptions that link student performance on maths examinations to safe medication practices. These assumptions are rooted historically. They fundamentally shape educational approaches assumed to support safe practice and protect patients from nursing error. Here, we apply an institutional ethnographic lens to the body of literature that both supports and critiques the emphasis on numeracy skills and medication safety. We use this form of inquiry to open an (...) alternate interrogation of these practices. Our main argument posits that numeracy skills serve as powerful distraction for both students and teachers. We suggest that they operate under specious claims of safety and objectivity. As nurse educators, we are captured by taken‐for‐granted understandings of practices intended to produce safety. We contend that some of these practices are not congruent with how competency actually unfolds in the everyday world of nursing practice. Ontologically grounded in the materiality of work processes, we suggest there is a serious disjuncture between educators' assessment and evaluation work where it links into broad nursing assumptions about medication work. These underlying assumptions and work processes produce contradictory tensions for students, teachers and nurses in direct practice. (shrink)

In traditional ethnographies, it is customarily assumed that the field researcher is an outsider who seeks to acquire an insider’s understanding of the social world being investigated. While conducting field research projects on education and tourism in Trinidad (West Indies) we found that the standard distinction between insider and outsider became problematic for us. Our experiences can be understood in terms of two competing conceptions of fieldwork. One, rooted in classical ethnography, views fieldwork as a process whereby the researcher learns (...) to translate the cultural practices of a little-known or misunderstood group into terms understandable to the ethnographic audience. The other, growing out of the institutional ethnography approach pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, views fieldwork as a process of mapping the relations that govern an institutional complex. In the latter approach, local experiences provide the point of departure for exploring a wider set of social arrangements. In this article, we treat our own fieldwork experiences as points of departure for a reflexive examination of this alternative ethnographic strategy. (shrink)

Mid-Twentieth Century declarations characterizing science as a 'Little democracy' and as autonomous from society continue to shape the arguments of scientists' and critics of science studies, including Meera Nanda's arguments. Yet such an image of science has long lost whatever empirical support it ever posessed. This article shares Nanda's concern to envision sciences which support social justice projects, but not the particular criticisms she makes of Feminist, post-colonial, and post-kuhnian science studies.

This paper describes the multi-methodological approach employed in a partial, situated, contingent and interpretive feminist political analysis of Catholic mothers and daughters. The study draws on a number of sources including transcripts of mother-daughter interviews, autobiographical anecdotes, photographs, music, icons of Catholicism and poetry. It is argued in this paper that a feminist multi-methodological approach is valuable to feminist research as it disrupts the linear and logocentric construct of traditional social science research. Moreover, a multi-methodological and multi-sourced approach opens up (...) sites so that the mothers and daughters in this study could be positioned within specific histories and contexts, and provided with a space so that as women they could reconstruct themselves as self-referential subjects. (shrink)

LIMOGES J.Nursing Inquiry2010;17: 58–64 An exploration of ruling relations and how they organize and regulate nursing education in the high‐fidelity patient simulation laboratoryRecently, schools of nursing have adopted the use of high‐fidelity human patient simulators in laboratory settings to teach nursing. Although numerous articles document the benefits of teaching undergraduate nursing students in this way, little attention has been paid to the discourses and texts organizing this approach. This institutional ethnography uses the critical feminist sociology of Dorothy E. Smith to (...) examine the literature and interviews with Practical and Bachelor of Science in Nursing students, and their faculty about this experience. The research shows how discourses rationalize and sustain certain processes at the expense of others. For example, ruling discourses such as biomedicine, efficiency, and the relational ontology are activated to construct the simulation lab as part of nursing and nursing education. The analysis also highlights the intended and unintended effects of these discourses on nursing education and discusses how emphasizing nursing knowledges can make the simulation lab a positive place for learning. (shrink)

La autora discute los antecedentes y consecuencias que tienen la construcción de nuestras categorías de conocimiento en la vida cotidiana y en la práctica científica. Mantiene que la elección de lo que es importante en el campo del conocimiento no es el resultado sólo de criterios metodológicos y científicos. Para mostrarlo, examina la tensión existente entre la metodología cuantitativa y la cualitativa como metodologías convencionales para obtener conocimiento.

Classical philosophy adopts the standpoint of males in the Greek polis. The consequent adumbration of the standpoint of women and noncitizen men in the oikos, the household, has implications for feminist philosophy. Two systems of action are differentiated: the domestic economy protected by the goddess Hestia, and the political economy protected by Hermes. Shifting one's standpoint to include both the oikos and the polis offers an alternative to gender as the defining issue in feminist theory.

Gerhard Lenski's classical work on stratification, "Power and Privilege", was an effort to reconcile and to synthesize different approaches to inequality incorporated into the grand theories of the day. It anticipated a variety of developments in the theoretical and empirical understanding of inequalities. These include recognition of the multiplicity of inequalities; emphasis on race, class, gender, and other sources and systems of domination and subordination; and the intersection of these factors in complex patterns to create different standpoints and life consequences. (...) The result was ground-breaking work that underscored the multidimensionality of stratification systems, the variability of their influences, and the notion that their intersection in itself has implications beyond the sum of component parts. In these ways his work foreshadowed the possibilities of finding common ground between modern and postmodern perspectives, to make Lenski the last grand theorist of modernity and a forerunner of postmodern theories of inequality. (shrink)

The concept of the subject is at the core of many social movements that attempt to empower disadvantaged groups by identifying a basic subjectivity underlying and uniting such groups. Though otherwise supportive of such movements, recent continental philosophers and social theorists such as Althusser, Derrida, and Butler have criticized such notions of subjectivity, arguing that they presuppose false and harmful ideas of unity and substantiality as the ‘true’ essence of these groups. In this paper, I propose that one possibility for (...) resolving this debate can be found in the work of Western Marxists such as Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. I argue that they ground an authentically subjective selfhood on the distinct meaningfulness of individual consciousness. Identifying phenomenological motifs in the way they describe consciousness, I suggest that they define meaning by the way different particular experiences recall or relate to one another. By interpreting the many possible meanings of experience, subjects are able to build up an image of themselves, while collective subjectivity can be grounded on the exegesis of shared experiences. Because such meaningfulness is genuinely sui generis, emerging within consciousness, action in accordance with such images counts as autonomous; at the same time, meaning is sufficiently fluid that there can never be one single correct interpretation of it. Ultimately, the Western Marxists suggest, it is in the constant formulation and reformulation of images of oneself through reinterpretation of one’s experience that constitutes subjective selfhood. (shrink)

As researchers, we cannot be outside society and thus activities such as "science," or "objectivity" are striated with procedures for minimizing or celebrating the presence of the researcher in the research product. Our recognition of the situated character of scientific knowledge is the context in which questions about the researchers relation to the group she studies have arisen. The paper begins with a review of the Insider/Outsider debate which circles around the researcher''s relation to those she studies. Where the researcher (...) enters the research site as an Insider - someone whose biography (gender, race, class, sexual orientation and so on) gives her a lived familiarity with the group being researched - that tacit knowledge informs her research producing a different knowledge than that available to the Outsider - a researcher who does not have an intimate knowledge of the group being researched prior to their entry into the group. This paper describes the research issues that arise and the various strategies researchers have used to manage them. The argument then shifts to query the social boundaries implicit in the construction of research Insiders and Outsiders. Reflecting on research that explored mothering for schooling, the article shows that researchers are rarely Insiders or Outsiders. Rather, research is constructed in a relationship with many Others. The interaction of individual biography and social location shape the research relation in complex ways which undercut the common-sense translation of historical familiarity into epistemological privilege. (shrink)

"Kids say the darndest things!" and "Aren't they cute!" are common responses when adults are amazed at things children say. To respond in this way, however, is all too often not to take children seriously enough. It is rather to see children to be imitating adults, to be acting "grown up" well before their time. It is not surprising, therefore, that the very idea of children doing philosophy would be considered to be unlikely.

This thesis constructs a model of the material causes of the capacity of individuals to act at work, by using the ontology of scientific realism to facilitate a synthesis between Marx and Foucault. This synthetic model is submitted as a solution to the long-standing problem of Industrial Relations theory, now manifest in the deconstruction of the organon of 'control'. The problems of 'control' are rooted in the radical concept of power and traditional, base/superstructure, interpretations of Marx. Developing an alternative to (...) the last provides the means of transcending the limitations of the first and the second. A realist, chronological-bibliographic reading of Marx provides an alternative to traditional interpretations, by creating a novel concept of his object, his initial explicandum and his putative explicans. This reading identifies a fresh problem with his model of capital: it cannot explain how labour is organized into a productive power and subsumed to capital. Foucault provides the means of resolving these deficiencies of Marx's explicans. A realist interpretation turns Marx and Foucault around to face each other, renders them compatible and establishes points of contact between their work. Together they constitute a model of the operative logic of production relations capable of explaining the organization of labour, its subsumption to capital and the materialism of civil society and the idealism of the state. On this basis, the contemporary form of the problem of Industrial Relations theory is explained. (shrink)

The fast growing interest in the work of university ethics review boards is evident in the proliferation of research and literature in the area. This article focuses on a Research Ethics Board (REB) in the Canadian context. In-depth, open-ended interviews with REB members and findings from a qualitative study designed to examine the ethics review of school-based research are used to illustrate points raised in the paper. The author’s experiences as academic researcher, advisor to student researchers and a 3-year term (...) as an REB member inform the discussion. Macro issues related to the general workings of the board (e.g., maintaining appropriate membership) and micro issues connected to individual REB members’ experiences of reviewing research applications are examined. The author’s goal is to contribute to a fastgrowing conversation related to the issues that influence university ethics review while drawing attention to the contribution that faculty members’ understandings of their work as REB members can make to that conversation. (shrink)