We're an open, informal reading group, interested in developing deeper understandings of the theoretical tools that may be useful in analysing new regimes of power in this context, and seek to theorise the relationships between their political-economic, discursive and performative dimensions in our research. However, in developing this focus the group also reads new work on cities, spatiality, feminist theory and practice, method and anti-method in social science, the state and critical governance studies, public policy and environmentalism.
All sessions in MB750 1.00-2.00
Wednesday 17 October 2012
Kymicka, W. and Banting, K. (2006) Immigration, multiculturalism and the welfare state. Ethics & International Affairs, 20, 3.
Abstract
There is surprisingly little evidence about the impact of increasing ethnic diversity on the welfare state, and claims that there is an inevitable trade-off between them may be premature. In this essay, we will examine the purported trade-off between diversity and the welfare state, survey the available evidence and discuss some preliminary results.
Wednesday 14 November 2012
Thevenot, L ( 2007) 'A Science of Life Together in the World', European Journal of Social Theory 10/2, 233-244.
Abstract
Borrowing Hannah Arendt’s phrase ‘to live together in the world’ (Arendt, 1958) for the title of this article is a way of situating the sciences of society in the past of moral and political philosophy, while at the same time choosing an author particularly sensitive to the reality of this politics, in the double sense of a practical undertaking and of a propitious material environment. And adding science as the objective is a way of making immediately visible the discordance implicit in the project of sciences of society. That the two terms clash when they are paired is what Arendt strove to convince us in the implacable indictment that she formulated against the social sciences. The thesis set forth summarily in this article, omitting more detailed arguments developed elsewhere, is that this discordancy is the source of a renewal of the sciences of life in society, resulting from a reappraisal of the critical points in their original project. This thesis will take on consistency in the course of answers offered, one by one, to the fruitful questions submitted to us by Alain Caillé.
Wednesday 12 December 2012
Action, C. and Hird, M. (2004) Toward a Sociology of Stammering. Sociology, 38(3): 495–513.
Abstract
Conversation is one of the most fundamental of all human activities. While most people take this form of interaction for granted, people who stammer often approach it with fear and trepidation. This article identifies stammering as a distinctly social event and highlights the relative neglect of the issue within the discipline of sociology. Drawing upon the work of George Mead and Erving Goffman we suggest that a distinctly sociological approach offers specific insights into stammering as an effect of social interaction. We argue that the strategies that people who stammer employ when passing and covering and the accounting practices that all individuals use in social interaction to define the difference between stammered and non-stammered speech are of sociological interest insofar as they provide valuable insights into the interaction of self and society, the tenuous distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, and the conceptual boundaries of disability.
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