Harvard Finds Scientist Guilty of Misconduct

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From Nicholas Wade, The New York Times

Dr. Hauser is a leader in the field of animal and human cognition, and in 2006 wrote a well-received book, “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.” Harvard’s findings against him, if sustained, may cast a shadow over the broad field of scientific research that depended on the particular research technique often used in his experiments.

Harvard University said Friday that it had found a prominent researcher, Marc Hauser, “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific misconduct.

Hours later, Dr. Hauser, a rising star for his explorations into cognition and morality, made his first public statement since news of the inquiry emerged last week, telling The New York Times, “I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes” and saying he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.”

To Read More…

Latest Social Sciences Journal Papers

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The latest issue of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

Seriously, What About Cousin Marriage?

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From Justin E.H. Smith

I recently spelled out some of the reasons why I remain doubtful about the prospects for transforming marriage, worldwide, into a gender-indifferent institution. (It is only the worldwide perspective that interests me.) I have not heard, in reply, any substantive arguments against the reasons I give for my doubts, and I have therefore decided that it might be a good idea to try one more time, and this time to make my call for serious engagement more explicit. I would sincerely like to know whether there is something I am missing.

I have been alarmed to see a sort of orthodoxy emerge as if out of nowhere over just the past few years (many of you will be old enough to remember when, in the not-so-distant past, Andrew Sullivan was condemned as a betrayer and a domesticator of the gay spirit for his powerful defense of same-sex marriage in Virtually Normal; I hope no one will try to tell me that everyone who condemned him at the time was, wittingly or un-, an enemy of human rights). This orthodoxy, like its opposite and indeed like all orthodoxies, presumes that any questioning of it amounts to hostility. There is no room in either of the prevailing orthodoxies that have formed around the controversy over same-sex marriage for someone like me: someone who supports marriage equality, but doubts, based on a thorough but admittedly incomplete reading of historical and anthropological scholarship, that the concept of marriage is in fact flexible enough to ever be transformed in such a way that marriage will cease to be heterosexual by presumption.

To Read More…

Wooden “Stonehenge” Emerges From Prehistoric Ohio

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From National Geographic

Just northeast of Cincinnati, Ohio, a sort of wooden Stonehenge is slowly emerging as archaeologists unearth increasing evidence of a 2,000-year-old ceremonial site.

Among their latest finds: Like Stonehenge, the Ohio timber circles were likely used to mark astronomical events such as the summer solstice.

Formally called Moorehead Circle but nicknamed “Woodhenge” by non-archaeologists, the site was once a leafless forest of wooden posts. Laid out in a peculiar pattern of concentric, but incomplete, rings, the site is about 200 feet (57 meters) wide.

Today only rock-filled postholes remain, surrounded by the enigmatic earthworks of Fort Ancient State Memorial. Some are thousands of feet long and all were built by Indians of the pre-agricultural Hopewell culture, the dominant culture in midwestern and eastern North America from about A.D. 1 to 900.

To Read More…

Social Sciences Journal, Volume 5, Number 2 now available

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The second issue of Volume 5 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

Volume 5, Number 2 includes:

Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 5, Number 2 now available’

Hey, Wait a Minute! Biological Roots of Today’s Anger

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From David P. Barash, The Chronicle Review

“No fair! No fair!

“No fair” must rank among the loudest and most readily evoked complaints. Nor is the din of inequity limited to children. Consider the widespread anger generated by the Wall Street and AIG bailouts: Regardless of whether they were justified as national policy, those and other departures from perceived evenhandedness have a long history of rousing departures from citizen complacency, and even from civility. Ditto for outrage over executives getting outsized bonuses and golden parachutes while the rest of us are left to soldier on as best we can.

In evolutionary terms, what’s going on here?

To Read More…

The Errors of Our Ways

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From Daniel Gilbert, The New York Times

In 1650, Oliver Cromwell asked the Church of Scotland to reconsider its decision to side with the royalists instead of him. “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” The church didn’t think it possible, of course, so Oliver’s army took Scotland.

According to Kathryn Schulz, each of us is our very own Church of Scotland — ­often mistaken, oddly oblivious and typically immune to a good beseeching. ­“Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” is an insightful and delightful discussion of the errors of our ways — why we make mistakes, why we don’t know we are making them and what we do when recognition dawns.

Schulz begins with a question that should puzzle us more than it does: Why do we love being right? After all, she writes, “unlike many of life’s other delights — chocolate, surfing, kissing — it does not enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our limbic systems, our swoony hearts.” Indeed, as she notes, “we can’t enjoy kissing just anyone, but we can relish being right about almost anything,” including that which we’d rather be wrong about, like “the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend’s relationship or the fact that at our spouse’s insistence, we just spent 15 minutes schlepping our suitcase in exactly the opposite direction from our hotel.”

To Read More…

Latest Papers from the Social Sciences Journal

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The latest papers published papers in The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences include:

Recently published in the Social Sciences Journal

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Recently published papers in The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences include:

Series: The Social Sciences

We are accepting book proposals for the imprint The Social Sciences.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

Social Sciences Journal - Become an Associate Editor

As part of the process of publishing The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences all submissions are sent for peer refereeing, prior to publication. Assessment, comments and guidance by the referees are an essential part of the publication process and invaluable to the authors of the submitted papers.

In recognition of the important role of referees, the international advisory board acknowledges all referees who have refereed papers as an ‘Associate Editor’ in the volume of the journal they have contributed to.

If you would like to referee papers submitted to The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, please email journals@thesocialsciences.com, with your professional details, areas of expertise and contact details. If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for papers within your expertise, we will contact you.

Social Sciences Journal: Recently Published

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Recently published papers in The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences include:

Sixth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences - Coming Soon

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Please continue to check the Social Sciences Newsletter for news and information about the 2011 Social Sciences Conference. We will announce the dates and location soon.

Social Sceicnes Conference–Share Your Photos

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To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Social Sciences Conference in Cambridge, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!

Join our Social Sciences Conference Flickr group here, and upload your pictures to easily share. Once you’ve joined, simply click on ‘Add something?’, and upload your photos or videos of the conference.

For information on sharing photos with Flickr, please read more here.

Style Points

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From Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education

It is widely agreed, by both insiders and outsiders, that something has gone wrong with much academic writing.

A great deal of it, says Anthony Haynes, the author of Writing Successful Academic Books and visiting professor at both Beijing Normal and Hiroshima universities, is ruined by “a kind of learned inability. No one is born writing sentences laden with adverbs.”

John Cornwell, director of the Science and Human Dimension Project based at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a journalist and written a number of best-selling books about the papacy. He is firmly committed to the value of academic rigour and believes that “there are aspects of academic work and publishing that aren’t for a wider readership, but still need to be done”. Yet he also believes that “much academic writing suffers from rigor mortis”.

The publisher Andrew Franklin takes a similar line. He runs Profile Books, which he defines as “a classic trade publisher”, in the sense that its list is “aimed at people who want to read our books rather than have to read them”. About half are written by academics. Whatever the subject matter, he says, “the writing is always a crucial factor in publishing decisions”.

To Read More…

Two Men and Two Paths

ts-kristof-190From Nicholas D. Krisof, The New York Times

When Wes Moore won a Rhodes scholarship in 2000, The Baltimore Sun published an article about his triumph. He was the first student at Johns Hopkins to win a Rhodes in 13 years, and the first black student there ever to win the award.

At about the same time, The Sun published articles about another young African-American man, also named Wes Moore. This one was facing charges of first-degree murder for the killing of an off-duty police officer named Bruce Prothero, a father of five.

Both Wes Moores had troubled youths in blighted neighborhoods, difficulties in school, clashes with authority and unpleasant encounters with police handcuffs. But one ended up graduating Phi Beta Kappa and serving as a White House fellow, and today is a banker with many volunteer activities. The other is serving a life prison sentence without the possibility of parole.

To Read More…

Latest Social Sciences Journal Papers

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The latest issue of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

Social Sciences Journal, Volume 5, Number 1 now available

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The first issue of Volume 5 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

Volume 5, Number 1 includes:

Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 5, Number 1 now available’

Profile: Wilhelm Dilthey

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From Marc A. Hight, tpm the philosophers’ magazine

Despite being hailed by the famed Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as “the most important thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century,” Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) remains an obscure figure to the Anglo-American world. This while notables like Heidegger and Husserl openly recognise their debt to the breadth and depth of Dilthey’s thought.

Dilthey is best known for his defence of the distinction between the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the natural sciences; a distinction his positivist-minded contemporaries were intent on denying. Yet this defence is best understood as a part of his lifelong goal to provide a secure foundation for the human sciences. These include disciplines like history, psychology, economics and sociology. Dilthey asked what history and psychology and the other human sciences require in order to be done at all. That is, what is required to understand humanity? The individual human sciences are portrayed by Dilthey as inter-related and to some degree inseparable parts of a distinctive way of knowing.

Both a professional philosopher and a practising historian (he acquired some fame for his intellectual biography of Schleiermacher), Dilthey believed that historical reflection was essential to understanding humanity. He also believed that philosophy only has value when serving a practical end. Humans are constantly wrestling with pain, irrational upsets, and questions about meaning in the world. We all have what Dilthey calls a “metaphysical impulse” to find a coherent picture of reality (a Weltanschauung or world view) which addresses these concerns. Religion is one response to this impulse. When the response is governed by critical reflection, we call it “philosophy”. Philosophy thus serves an important role: to produce rules for action and empower those who use it by increasing self-awareness. Various religions and philosophies generate world views which seek to account for the world as we experience it.

To Read More…

How Blind to Change are You?

From Victoria Gill, BBC

This failure to notice what should be very apparent is something we unconsciously experience every day as our brains filter the barrage of visual information which we are flooded with. And apparently it has a name; it is called change blindness.

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London, have invented a unique spot-the-difference-style computer game in order to study it.

Milan Verma, a scientist at Queen Mary, explains: “It’s the phenomenon where seemingly striking or obvious changes are not noticed.” He and his colleagues are asking volunteers to play the game - which involves looking at a screen as it flashes between two images of the same scene.

“It flicks between a pre-change version and a post-change version of the scene,” Dr Verma explains. “The volunteers simply have to press the button and tell us exactly when they spot the change.”

Trying out the game at Dr Verma’s office, my initial reaction was self-satisfaction; I spotted the difference in the first scene - a picture of a butterfly with orange stripes on its wings - almost immediately.

In the pre-change scene the colourful insect had two stripes - one on each wing, and on the post-change, there was just one. Easy. Next?

To Read More…

Guy Deutscher: Language Alters How we Think

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From Robert McCrum, Guardian

Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world.

An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old linguist draws on a range of sources in the book to show language reflecting the society in which it is spoken. In the process, he explains why Russian water (a “she”) becomes a “he” once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has.

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High-Profile Suicides of Public Intellectuals have Contributed to the Stereotype of “Tormented Genius.” But are Smarter People Really More Likely to Take Their Own Lives?

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From Dave Munger, Seed

Conventional wisdom says that gifted artists like Vincent van Gogh and Sylvia Plath had something in their constitution that made them much more susceptible to depression, and thus, to suicide. One of the smartest people I ever knew, a former high school classmate who was also a world-class rower, took his own life as pressures for perfection at his Ivy-League university became too much for him. Such stories, painful and tragic, lend credence to the belief that smart people are more likely to commit suicide. But do we remember these stories because they are commonplace, or are they notable only because they are also actually rare?

Because of the relative rarity of suicide, researching its causes is problematic. Most studies therefore investigate attempted suicide, which is much more common. Since attempted suicides are very strongly correlated with actual suicides, they can serve as a reasonable proxy measurement.

To Read More…

Cyborg Soldiers and Militarised Masculinities

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From Eurozine

In “Fact and Fantasy: The Body of Desire in the Age of Posthumanism”, Renée C. Hoogland (2002: 214) argues that “in the increasingly technologized age of posthumanism, bodily matters are, quite simply, too substantial to be left to the ‘empirically’ inclined minds of natural scientists”, and therefore calls on cultural theorists to take up the weighty issue of bodily matters. Recent developments indicate, however, that bodily matters are more and more coming under the ambit of the “strategic” and “security” inclined minds populating military institutions and government administrative offices, in ways perhaps far more troubling and disturbing in all of its potential and real implications. In the post-9/11 context of the war on/of terror, one can scarcely overemphasize the dangerous possibilities signalled in this shift. Dangerous, in that bodily matters are being taken up by institutions primarily concerned with the defence and security of the nation-state in an increasingly biopolitical architecture of power.

Image from deviantart

To Read More…

All Evolution, All the Time: David Sloan Wilson Explains why Evolution is of Consequence to Everyone

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From Emma Marris, Nauture News

Endlessly energetic scholar David Sloan Wilson is best known for his work on group selection — the idea that natural selection can operate on traits that improve the success of groups rather than individuals.

As well as running a cross-disciplinary evolutionary studies programme from his home institution of Binghamton University in New York and opening the Evolution Institute think tank to inform public policy, he recently began studying altruism in Binghamton neighbourhoods and is promoting the field of evolutionary religious studies. He took time to talk to Nature at a philosophy of biology conference last week in Madison, Wisconsin, where he spoke about using evolutionary thinking as a tool for good.

You wrote a book called Evolution for Everyone. Why is it important to you that the public understand evolution?

Because it is useful. The way most people understand evolution, it is not consequential, and so they don’t need to believe it. The 50% figure — how many people in the US don’t accept evolution — doesn’t impress me. Close to 100% of people don’t connect it to matters of consequence in their own lives.

To Read More…

Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud - “A Dream of Undying Fame”

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From 3 Quarks Daily

I invited Louis Breger, PhD to join me in this article devoted to a discussion of Sigmund Freud. After my two-parter, “Sigmund Freud – Personal and Scientific Coward?” [PART 1, PART 2], I received an email from Dr. Breger. A friend directed him to 3Quarksdaily.com, and my second article. He had a few things to say about my article, including a couple of critical comments.

I recognized, immediately, that Breger knew a great deal about Freud – far more than I. Breger has been Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, from 1970 to the present, (currently, Emeritus Professor.) In 1990, with a group of colleagues, Dr. Breger created the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (ICP) where he was the Founding President from 1990 to 1993.


My interest in Freud is highly circumscribed. Breger is best described as a lifelong scholar of Freud and psychoanalysis,  as well as a practitioner, a trainer, and a teacher. Breger directed me to his two books on Freud. The first is an analytical biography, “FREUD: DARKNESS IN THE MIDST OF VISION”, John Wiley & Sons, 2000.  The second is “A DREAM OF UNDYING FAME: HOW FREUD BETRAYED HIS MENTOR AND INVENTED PSYCHOANALYSIS,” Basic Books, 2009. The more recent book, included in the title of this article, deals with the territory covered in my writing, and so much more.

The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P.

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From Jon Gertner, The New York Times

Whatever you may think progress looks like — a rebounding stock market, a new house, a good raise — the governments of the world have long held the view that only one statistic, the measure of gross domestic product, can really show whether things seem to be getting better or getting worse. G.D.P. is an index of a country’s entire economic output — a tally of, among many other things, manufacturers’ shipments, farmers’ harvests, retail sales and construction spending. It’s a figure that compresses the immensity of a national economy into a single data point of surpassing density. The conventional feeling about G.D.P. is that the more it grows, the better a country and its citizens are doing. In the U.S., economic activity plummeted at the start of 2009 and only started moving up during the second half of the year. Apparently things are moving in that direction still. In the first quarter of this year, the economy again expanded, this time by an annual rate of about 3.2 percent.

To Read More…

Where Are You From?

whereareyoufrom_frontWhere Are You From? Voices in Transition edited by  Margaret Kumar, Heather D’Cruz and Niranjala Weerakkody is now available from The Social Sciences imprint.

Where are you from? Voices in Transition records the diverse recollections and reflections of fourteen Asian Australian women about the question ‘where are you from?’ posed to them and assumptions about their identity made by different people at different times, locations and contexts. The book examines why in the globalised world we live in today, it is not always possible to label or describe a person as having one specific cultural or national identity as they are expected to do by those asking the question.

‘… The question, ‘where are you from?’ can serve a function of demanding an explanation from minority groups about how they belong to a particular community, and whether they even have right to do so. A person who is assumed to belong to the dominant group is seldom asked this question.

The essays in this wonderful volume provide personal narratives of how issues of identity and belonging are negotiated in ways that are always complex and difficult, even painful and haunting, but also creative and playful. They show how answers to the question, ‘where are you from?’ are never uniformly and predictably available, but require telling of personal histories, cultural traditions and professional aspirations but are also continually reshaped by new cultural experiences and exchange. We interpret new experiences in a variety of ways that involve not only particular historical understandings but also acts of imagination that are always a product of a range of factors, both historical and social, as well as political and strategic.’

(Professor Fazal Rizvi, Foreword to Where are you from? Voices in Transition.)

Metric Mania

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From John Allen Paulos, The New York Times

In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers. To hold teachers accountable, we examine their students’ test scores. To improve medical care, we quantify the effectiveness of different treatments. There is much to be said for such efforts, which are often backed by cutting-edge reformers. But do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.

To Read More…

Juliet Mitchell to speak at 2010 Social Sciences Conference in Cambridge

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Juliet Mitchell is Professor Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies and Head of Department in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge. She is a Full Member of the International Psychoanalytic Society. Her books include: Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition; Psychoanalysis and Feminism and Women’s Estate; and Women: The Longest Revolution. Her latest book, Siblings, was published by Polity Press in October 2003. Juliet Mitchell is married to anthropologist Jack Goody and has one daughter and five step-children. She lives in Cambridge, U.K.

For more inforamtion, please visit our web-site.

Jack Goody to speak at 2010 Social Sciences Conference in Cambridge

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Anthropologist and Professor Sir John (Jack) Rankine Goody has been a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge since 1961. He received his knighthood in 2005, the same year he was inducted as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US. He started his career as an anthropologist with fieldwork in an African village, where he became a friend of the ancestors. Since then Professor Goody has opened up several new fields of study tackling themes as diverse as the impact of writing on societies, cooking, the culture of flowers, the family, feminism and the contrast between eastern and western cultures. Now in his 80s and officially retired, he continues to write and study, giving seminars and speaking at conferences with a mixture of spontaneity and brilliance which captivates and inspires his audience.

For more information please visit our web-site.

2010 Social Sciences Conference - Conference Dinner at Peterhouse College

We are pleased to announce the 2010 Social Sciences Conference Dinner at Peterhouse College is now available for registration. hall-refurb1-medium

The dining hall at Peterhouse was completed in 1290 and, in continuous use by Fellows and students for over 700 years, is the oldest collegiate building in Cambridge, making it a unique venue for all occasions.

While the structure is medieval, the interior was redesigned in the late 19th century, with dark panelling and Masters’ portraits, a minstrel’s gallery and William Morris stained glass, stencilling and tiles combining to create a dramatic back-drop for grand dinners.

Dinner will begin at 19:00 (7:00 pm). Seating is limited to 100 people, so please register early for this special evening.

Full Employment: The Golden Age is in Us

From Benjamin Kunkel, n+1imagephp

The inherent right to work is one of the elemental privileges of a free people.
FDR, radio address, 1937

Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state, and so on—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least. From the establishment of FDR’s war economy through the end of the so-called golden age of capitalism in the early 1970s, the US matched other major economies in functioning at close to full employment (at least as the term is defined by economic orthodoxy, on which more later). In the troughs of recessions, the unemployment rate might touch 7 percent, but otherwise it wavered between about 3 and 5.5. And even with the onset in 1973 of what Robert Brenner, in the commanding economic history of the period, called the long downturn—a decline across the system in rates of growth and profit, persisting to this day—the US touted a distinctly better record of job creation than its main European rivals. The average unemployment rate for the ’70s came to slightly above 6 percent; for the ’80s, above 7; and for the ’90s, just below 6—a marked deterioration since the end of the golden age, but not bad by international standards. The years from 1997 to 2006 saw an average stateside rate below 5 percent, achieved though this was with the decisive aid of serial financial bubbles.

To Read More…

2010 Social Sciences Conference - Tours of Cambridge

We are pleased to announce that 2010 Social Sciences Tours are now available for registration.

A Tour of Cambridge on Foot and by Punt - Sunday, 1 August - 18:30 (6:30 pm)

The guide will meet you at Murray Edwards College and take you on a walking tour through the historic streets of Cambridge, followed by a river trip in chauffeured punts along the Backs. At the end you can either walk back to college with the guide, or stay on in town at one of the historic hostelries.
Length of tour approx. 2 hours

Evening Coach Tour of Cambridge Including Pub Stop - Monday, 2 August -18:30 (6:30 pm)

The tour will start from Murray Edwards College. You will be escorted on the coach by a guide who will entertain you with fascinating information about Cambridge and the surrounding region. In the historic village of Grantchester, famed for its connection with Rupert Brooke the poet and Jeffrey Archer the author, you will stop for a drink at the historic thatch-roofed pub, the Red Lion.
Length of tour approx 2.5 hours.

Ghost Tour of Cambridge - Wednesday, 4 August - 18:30 (6:30 pm)

The guide will take you on a walking tour of haunted Cambridge and regale you with tales of ghosts and strange happenings.
Length of tour 1.5 hours.

Walking Tour of Cambridge - Wednesday, 4 August - 18:30 (6:30 pm)

This tour will take you to different parts of Cambridge from those you may have seen if you went on the Sunday walking and punting tour. Narrow streets and quaint houses, colleges and university buildings abound.
Length of tour 1.5 hours.

Literary Tour of Cambridge - Wednesday, 4 August - 18:30 (6:30 pm)

This tour will introduce you to the Literary side of Cambridge. Wordsworth, Pepys, Byron and Tennyson are just a few of the many famous names emanating from both University and town. Both ancient and modern authors, you will hear about them, see where they worked and what inspired them.
Length of tour 1.5 hours.

For more information please visit the conference web-site.

Redesigned Newsletter: Launched Today

Today the Social Sciences Newsletter will be re-launched - marking the start of a new approach to connecting with and reaching out to our Social Sciences Community. The  newsletter will be sent out on a monthly basis and will contain important community news, conference updates, and publication information.

It is the hope of Common Ground Publishing that this newsletter will provide you with a more positive experience connecting with the Social Sciences Community.

If you are not currently a subscriber but would like to receive future newsletter emails, please go to thesocialsciences.com and click on “Sign Up: Our Newsletter” in the upper right-hand corner.

If you have inquiries, concerns, or general comments, please feel free to contact the newsletter team at support@thesocialsciences.com.

Chomsky on Cognitive Science, and Anarchism

From 3 Quarks Daily6a00d8341c562c53ef01347fb177bd970c-500wi

NOAM CHOMSKY: The first question here is from cocoon56: Do you currently see an elephant room of cognitive science, just like you named one 50 years ago—I guess that’s a reference to my critique of radical behaviorism—something that needs addressing that gets too little attention?

Well, one thing that I think gets too little attention in the room of cognitive science is cognitive science. Most of the work that’s done just doesn’t seem to me to bear on cognitive science. I could pick up a couple of journals here and give examples.

To Read More...

The World Bank Data: Open Data Access Can be Beautiful

From information aesthetics

The Worldbank, an international financial institution that provides leveraged loans to developing countries for capital programs has just released data.worldbank.org, a website that provides free, open and easy access to statistics and indicators about development. While the idea is not particularly novel (think of UNData, Google Public Data, data.gov and many others) the World Bank Data website seems unique by the combination of offering free datasets and indicators as well as a compelling visual interface for open data exploration. Many indicators are also available to developers to create new data applications and visualizations through an Application Programming Interface (API). worldbank_data1

The visual dashboard in particular shows a surprising level of visual sophistication and detail, and gives access to economically relevant topics like Education or CO2 emission, or country-specific statistics of countries ranging from the U.S. to Rwanda.

The fact that the information architecture and visual style is contemporary and consistent, that even the smallest data widget offers a direct link to the actual data source, and that the interface is offered in different languages demonstrates the amount of dedication put in this project. However, the vertical axis labels seem to be missing, and the amount of space dedicated to specific data attributes that are almost always “not available” seem to be annoying oversights.

To Read More…

Neurocapitalism

From Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit, Eurozine

Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics. Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences’ usurpatory tendency to become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the brain. blanco

Whether or not one accepts the universal validity of this maxim, it is fair to assume that a science that aggressively seeks to establish hermeneutic supremacy will change everyday capitalist reality via its discoveries and products. Or, to put it more cautiously, that its triumph is legitimated, if not enabled, by a significant shift in the capitalist world order.

There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and mitigate the self-generated “malfunctioning” to which its constituent subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism’s algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of supply and demand.

To Read More…

Latest Social Science Journal Papers

The latest issue, Volume 4, Number 12, of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

David Carmel on Consciousness

From Five Books

Your first choice, Introducing Consciousness by David Papineau and Howard Selina, is presumably trying to make a very complex topic accessible by presenting it using graphic art?five_books_home_main_image-4

Yes, it’s part of the Introducing… series that presents various topics in graphic form, a bit like a comic book. What I liked about this one is that it takes a very complex issue and shows that you do not need to be a great philosopher, or have a very deep understanding of the science, to understand why it’s a complex issue and what the fundamental questions we’re dealing with are. And the truth is that with consciousness we’re still at the point of raising the interesting questions, as philosophers have done for the last 2,000 years, rather than at the interesting, complex, answers stage. Despite being highly approachable, this book is a serious piece of work that gives a great overview of past and current thinking about consciousness, especially from the philosophical perspective. Most books or articles will look at the issue of consciousness from a different angle, and I’ve tried to balance that out in my choices. This particular book was written by a professor of philosophy, David Papineau, in conjunction with an illustrator. So it’s mostly about the philosophy of mind, with particular reference to consciousness, and while it mentions science here and there, that’s really not the main focus: where it mentions the science, this is done to describe potential methodologies with which to address the philosophical questions that have been raised.

To Read More…

Who’s Counting: Jobs, Health Care, and Twitter

From John Allen Paulos, ABCNews

nm_statistics_100305_mnAs usual, simple arithmetic is crucial to understanding many of the biggest, most important news stories (as well as those, like the Tiger Woods saga, that are of no public significance). What follows is a collage of some of these stories.

One problem is that people often view numbers as providing decoration rather than information. Over the last couple of weeks, for example, I performed a little experiment with people I randomly met.

If our idle conversation turned to current events, I mentioned a headline I claimed to have just read proclaiming, “Experts Fear Annual Housing Costs in the U.S. (Rent, Mortgage Payments) May Top $2 Billion.” I followed up with, “Imagine that — more than 2 billion dollars per year.”

To Read More…

Tug of War

tug-of-war-perfect-low_frontTug of War by Tony English is now available from The Social Sciences imprint.

Tony English wrote Tug of War for negotiation experts and others who might be interested in a fresh analytical method which draws on the literature of negotiation but delves into many other disciplines, including international relations, fine arts, philosophy, management, anthropology and psychology. The book focuses on international negotiation but is relevant to negotiation in general. Tony interviewed many veteran negotiators in diplomacy, hostage release and business. He weaves the rich character, skills and experience of individual veterans into the book, and presents two cases in  fine detail.

The informants include: Hugh Davies, lead British negotiator for the return of Hong Kong to China; Sir Alan Donald, British Ambassador to China and several other countries; Terry Waite, of Beirut kidnap fame; Meg McDonald, Australian Ambassador for the Environment and team leader for the greenhouse gas negotiations at Kyoto; Malcolm Lyon, Australia’s lead negotiator for the Torres Strait Treaty with Papua New Guinea; Don Kenyon, Australian Ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the European Union, and former Chairman of the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body; Doug Anderson, Managing Director of P & O Ports; Sam Passow, Research Director of London’s Centre for Dispute Resolution; Geoff  Goon, a major exporter of fruit and vegetables from Australia to the Middle East; Steven Hochman and Kirk Wolcott, dispute resolution advisers to President Jimmy Carter; and a few others who needed anonymity. Tony also draws on his own experience in several countries.

At the core of the book is the tension, which comprises complementary phenomena, both physical and abstract, that compete for influence over our behaviour. Profuse forces generate tensions. Tony presents a model of negotiation context that comprises tensions and the forces generating them. Expert negotiators are expert tension managers and therefore have high ‘contextual intelligence’, a variation on Robert Sternberg’s concept of Successful Intelligence in cognitive psychology. Tony links contextual intelligence with seven traits identified in his veterans. Some writers refer to the tension but neglect its nuances and miss its generic value in analyzing negotiations and other human activity as people try to impose manageable order on chaotic information. We are all tension managers, whether or not we are aware of it.

Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 12 now available

social-sciences-cover

The final issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

Volume 4, Number 12 includes:

Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 12 now available’

2010 Social Sciences Conference Accomodation at Cambridge- Now Available

Stay on-site and book your accommodations for the conference at Murray Edwards College.  You may book your reservation during registration or through the conference secretariat .p4080651

5th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Fifth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences
2-5 August 2010
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

www.SocialSciencesConference.com

Plenary Speakers

http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2010/plenary-speakers/

  • Rom Harre, Distinguished Research Professor, Psychology Department, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA
  • Juliet Mitchell, Professor, Department in Social and Political Sciences, University  of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
  • The Energy Cultures Team: Dr. Janet Stephenson, Professor Rob Lawson, Professor Gerry Carrington, University of Otago, New Zealand
  • Jack Goody, Fellow, St. John’s College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
  • Patrick Baert, Fellow, Selwyn College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Call for Papers

If you intend to present a paper at the Conference, your participation begins with submission of a paper proposal. For information on proposals, presentation types, and other options, see: http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/#ppt. To submit a proposal, see: http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2010/call-for-papers/. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the Conference.

Registration

Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. For registration options, or to register for the 2010 Social Sciences Conference, see: http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2010/register/.

Themes

http://thesocialsciences.com/ideas/themes/

Lessons Learned and Open Questions: Welfare State Building in Post-Communist EU Member States

From Claus Offe, Eurozine

offe_460w
Democracy” in post-communist Europe is strongly associated with high levels of state-sponsored social protection, indicating a culture far removed from the prevalent system of market-mediated private provision. The dissatisfaction with democracy expressed by the many not to have benefited from transition suggests CEE welfare states have a long way to go before they attain western levels of credibility. Their democracies depend on that gap being bridged.

All the new member states that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007 – apart from the one and a half small Mediterranean islands of Malta and the southern part of Cyprus – share the quality of having emerged, after 1989, from the economic, social, and political regime of state socialism. One of the recurrent themes throughout the chapters of this volume[1] are the following questions: To what extent can the evolution of CEE welfare states be accounted for in terms of path dependency and the continuity of state socialist as well as those institutional patterns that were adopted in the region during the interwar period? And to what extent do we encounter path departures that were conditioned by the two dominant novelties of (a) the breakdown of state socialism with the subsequent deep transformation crisis and (b) the accession of the new members to the European Union and its patterns of capitalist democracy, as well as the conditionalities governing eastern enlargement? In dealing with these questions, the authors share an analytical frame that dominates much of the academic literature on current affairs in CEE. Stated at the most general level, this frame suggests that what we see happening in the region must be accounted for in terms of a joint outcome of “the past” and “the West”.

To Read More…

Community Development Practice: Stories, Method, Meaning

ingamells-front Community Development Practice: Stories, Method, Meaning edited by Ann IngamellsAthena LathourasRoss Wiseman, Peter Westoby and Fiona Caniglia is available from The Social Sciences imprint.

Thankfully, another publication from the creative Queensland Community Development ‘crowd’…Indeed, what would we do without them in a rather sedate and seemingly stagnant Australian publishing landscape in so far as Community Development is concerned…? What I most particularly appreciate is the editors’ and contributors’ ongoing attempts at creating ‘living theory’ informed by their ongoing practice and their holding on to the spiritual, democratic, relational and dialogical principles for which their work has become known. The book therewith documents its authors’ continuing attempts at developing good practical and reflective support for their ongoing social change efforts, something our local community development scene could very well do with…

Jacques Boulet, editor New Community Quarterly.

C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web

16cspan_ca0-articleinlineFrom Brian Stelter in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Researchers, political satirists and partisan mudslingers, take note: C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet.

The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.

Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is “like being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host.

Ed Morrissey, a senior correspondent for the conservative blog Hot Air (hotair.com), said, “The geek in me wants to find an excuse to start digging.”

For the article…

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

jobless-america-future-200From Don Peck in The Atlantic

HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.

The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.

All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.

For the full article…

Latest Social Sciences Journal papers

The latest issue, Volume 4, Number 11, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

The Energy Cultures Team to Speak in Cambridge

Energy Cultures brings together a multi-disciplinary team of researchers in a 3 year project on household energy behaviours based at Otago University, New Zealand.   group1

The ‘Energy Cultures’ research programme applies a novel combination of complementary social science methods to improve understanding of the drivers of household energy behaviours, and to deliver an effective strategy to achieve more energy-efficient behaviours.

Our disciplinary backgrounds include physics/engineering, economics, marketing, sociology/human geography and law.  Prof Lawson, Dr Stephenson and Prof Carrington will co-present at the plenary.

To Read More…

Rethinking Secularism: A Postsecular World Society?: An Interview with Jürgen Habermas

From The Immanent Flame,

EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the need to rethink the link between social theory and secularization theory. In those lectures, you suggest that we need to uncouple modernization theory from secularization theory. Does this mean that you are taking distance from the dominant trends in social theory in the West, which began with Pareto, continued through Durkheim, and reached their apogee in Weber, and thus also from its explicit and avowed Eurocentrism?

JH: We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The debate over the sociological thesis of secularization has led to a revision above all in respect to prognostic statements. On the one hand, the system of religion has become more differentiated and has limited itself to pastoral care, that is, it has largely lost other functions. On the other hand, there is no global connection between societal modernization and religion’s increasing loss of significance, a connection that would be so close that we could count on the disappearance of religion. In the still undecided dispute as to whether the religious USA or the largely secularized Western Europe is the exception to a general developmental trend, José Casanova for example has developed interesting new hypotheses. In any case, globally we have to count on the continuing vitality of world religions.

In view of the consequences of which you speak, I consider the program of the group around Shmuel Eisenstadt and its comparative research on civilizations promising and informative. In the emerging world society, and concerning the social infrastructure, there are, as it were, by now only modern societies, but these appear in the form of multiple modernities because the great world religions have had a great culture-forming power over the centuries, and they have not yet entirely lost this power. As in the West, these “strong” traditions paved the way in East Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Africa for the development of cultural structures that confront each other today—for example, in the dispute over the right interpretation of human rights. Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity repeats itself today in other parts of the world. There, too, one reaches back to one’s own traditions to confront the challenges of societal modernization, rather than to succumb to them. Against this background, intercultural discourses about the foundations of a more just international order can no longer be conducted one-sidedly, from the perspective of “first-borns.” These discourses must become habitual [sich einspielen] under the symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking if the global players are to finally bring their social-Darwinist power games under control. The West is one participant among others, and all participants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their respective blind spots. If we were to learn one lesson from the financial crisis, it is that it is high time for the multicultural world society to develop a political constitution.

To Read More…

Recently Published in the Social Sciences Journal

The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 11, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 11 now available

The eleventh issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

Volume 4, Number 11 includes:

Announcing the winner of the International Award for Excellence

social-sciences-coverCongratulations to Sean M. Clark, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of interdisciplinary social sciences for his paper Revealing Clio’s Secrets: The Case for Historical Macromeasurement

Abstract: An excessive focus on methodological training and recent case studies has left political scientists woefully ignorant of work done by scholars in other fields, particularly that of economic historians and historical demographers. Most glaringly, political science has missed the emergence of ‘cliodynamics,’ or the novel attempt to fashion broad historical trends into consistently measurable data over great lengths of time. I therefore not only submit a comprehensive survey of the population, economy, and conflict research offered by historiographers, but also explain how this data can be harnessed by political science.

If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.


The Decline of the Decline of Arabic Science

From Austin Dacey, Skeptical Inquirer

Just as soon as anyone notes the dismal state of science in contemporary Muslim-majority countries, someone else with a little knowledge of copernicushistory will observe that the Islamic world was once the center of the scientific world, and Arabic was once the lingua franca. From the eighth to the end of the fourteenth centuries, the most important work in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and medicine took place under Muslim rule.

Before Europe’s first university had opened in Bologna, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was amassing a library that reportedly housed as many as four hundred thousand volumes. There, under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic-speaking scholars—including Persians, Christians, Jews, and others—translated Greek texts by authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as material in Persian, Syriac, and Sanskrit. It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this ancient learning came to Europe, primarily by way of Muslim Spain. As late as the seventeenth century, European colleges still relied on the Canon, a medical textbook by Avicenna, the Latinized name of the medieval physician and polymath Ibn Sina.

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Finalists for the International Award for Excellence

Congratulations to all of the Award Winner finalists:

  • Maria Chong AbdullahHabibah EliasRahil Mahyuddin and Jegak UliThe Relationship between Emotional Intelligence and Adjustment Amongst First Year Students in a Malaysian Public University
  • Helen Joanna Boon, Stephen Tobias, Bernhard T. Baune, Tarun Sen Gupta and Lee Kennedy: Ars Cooperativa Naturae. Ethical Contingencies Across Medicine and Education: A Case Study
  • Chris Braddock: Sympathetic Magic and Contemproary Art: Stanley J. Tambiah’s Persuasive Analogy in Ritual Performance (to be included in an upcoming issue)
  • D. Burcu EgilmezThe Politics of the Turkish Gecekondu (Slum) Dwellers: A Case Study on the Izmir Kurucesme District
  • Joseph GalboEthnographies of Empire and Resistance: “Wilderness” and the “Vanishing Indian” in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “A Fortnight in the Wilderness” and John Tanner’s “Narrative of Captivity”
  • Barbara J. Kampa and Raphael NawrotzkiAssisting and Protecting Refugee Women: A Policy Analysis
  • Fazil Najafi, Sofia Vidalis, Kim Munksgaard and Matthew Diamond: Effective Environmental Policy toward Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Produced from Transportation (to be included in an upcoming issue)
  • Amla Salleh, Zahara Aziz, Abd. Aziz Mahyuddin and Zuria MahmudHow do Malaysian Adolescent Children Perceive their Fathers’ Involvement in their Parenting?
  • Krista SiglerGreat Expectations: Advertising and the Problem of Consumer Capitalism in Late Imerial Russia, 1905-1917

  • Editorial: Nietzsche and European Posthumanisms

    image001From Russell Blackford, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Evolution and Technology:

    In issue 20(1) of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, we published “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (March 2009). In this intriguing article, Sorgner argues that there aresignificant similarities between the concept of the posthuman (as typically deployed in transhumanist thought) and Nietzsches celebrated notion of the overhuman (often referred to, perhaps misleadingly, as the Superman”). Sorgner does not claim that late twentieth-century and contemporary transhumanist thinkers were knowingly influenced by Nietzsche: this is a question that he explicitly leaves open. Nor does he depict transhumanism as monolithic, or the concept of the posthuman as unambiguous. For all that, he suggests that the similarity between the two concepts – overhuman and posthuman – is not merely superficial: it lies at a fundamental level.

    Sorgner compares the posthuman and overhuman concepts in a way that is calculated to bring out a deep similarity. He discusses, for example, how the relevant systems of thought are alike in viewing humanity as merely a work in progress, with only limited potential in the absence of a radical transformation. Humanity is, in other words,  not an evolutionary culmination but something that cries out for improvement. Sorgner adds, however, that the idea of the overhuman provides Nietzsche with a grounding for values that appears to be missing in transhumanist thought.

    For more…

    Children’s Participation?

    front_mason-9781863356886-perfectChildren’s Participation? Learning from Children and Adults in the Asia-Pacific Region edited by Jan MasonNatalie Bolzan and Anil Kumar is available from The Social Sciences imprint.

    This edited book is the result of collaboration between five countries in the Asia Pacific Region. It is auspiced by Childwatch International, a global research network.

    It explores the socio-cultural context of children’s participation in the five countries, in response to the obligations on these countries, as signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. While the legal mandating of participation has significant implications for children’s lives and adult-child relations, research in this area has been limited, particularly cross culturally.

    Recently Published in the Social Sciences Journal

    The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 10, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

    Recently Published in the Social Sciences Journal

    The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 10, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 10 now available

    The tenth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 10 includes:

    Social Sciences Journal Associate Editors

    The Associate Editors listing for Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences is now available.

    Recently Published in the Social Sciences Journal

    The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 9, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 9

    The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 9, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

    How messy it all is

    From David Runciman, The London Review of Books.

    The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
    Allen Lane, 331 pp, £20.00, March 2009, ISBN 978 1 84614 039 6

    The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is. In graph after graph measuring various welfare functions, the authors show that the best predictor of how countries will rank is not the differences in wealth between them (which would result in the US coming top, with the Scandinavian countries and the UK not too far behind, and poorer European nations like Greece and Portugal bringing up the rear) but the differences in wealth within them (so the US, as the most unequal society, comes last on many measures, followed by Portugal and the UK, both places where the gap between rich and poor is relatively large, with Spain and Greece somewhere in the middle, and the Scandinavian countries invariably out in front, along with Japan). Just as significantly, this pattern holds inside the US as well, where states with high levels of income inequality also tend to have the greatest social problems. It is true that some of the most unequal American states are also among the poorest (Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia), so you might expect things to go worse there. But some unequal states are also rich (California), whereas some fairly equal ones are also quite poor (Utah). Only a few (New Hampshire, Wyoming) score well on both counts. What the graphs show are the unequal states tending to cluster together regardless of income, so that California usually finds itself alongside Mississippi scoring badly, while New Hampshire and Utah both do consistently well. Income inequality, not income per se, appears to be the key. As a result, the authors are able to draw a clear conclusion: ‘The evidence shows that even small decreases in inequality, already a reality in some rich market democracies, make a very important difference to the quality of life.’ Achieving these decreases should be the central goal of our politics, precisely because we can be confident that it works. This is absolutely not, they insist, a ‘utopian dream’.

    To Read More…

    A Hero of our Time

    From Susan Sontag, The New York Review of Books.

    Structural Anthropology
    by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Translated from the French by Claire Jacobson, by Brook Grundfest Schoepf

    The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but, on the other hand, the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity. The alternative is inescapable: either I am a traveller in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveller of my own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality. In either case I am the loser…for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking shape. —from Tristes Tropiques

    Claude Lévi-Strauss—the man who has created anthropology as a total occupation, involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst—is no man of letters. Most of his writings are scholarly, and he has always been associated with the academic world. Since 1960 he has held a very grand academic post, the newly created chair of social anthropology at the Collège de France, and heads a large and richly endowed research institute. But his academic eminence and ability to dispense patronage are scarcely adequate measures of the formidable position he occupies in French intellectual life today. In France, where there is more awareness of the adventure, the risk involved in intelligence, a man can be both a specialist and the subject of general and intelligent interest and controversy. Hardly a month passes in France without a major article in some serious literary journal, or an important public lecture, extolling or damning the ideas and influence of Lévi-Strauss. Apart from the tireless Sartre and the virtually silent Malraux, he must be the most interesting intellectual figure in France today.

    To Read More…

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 9 now available

    The ninth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 9 includes:

    What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

    From Tony Judt, The New York Review of Books.

    The following is adapted from a lecture given at New York University on October 19, 2009.

    Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime.

    When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.”

    To Read More…

    Interdisciplinary Hype

    socialscience1

    From Jerry A. Jacobs, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

    Recently we’ve heard a lot of talk about interdisciplinarity, along with claims that traditional academic departments are limiting the ability of the modern university to meet the world’s most daunting intellectual challenges. Will the disciplines soon be seen as anachronisms, holdovers from an outdated 20th-century model? In my view, efforts to reorganize academe based on interdisciplinary principles would have disastrous consequences in the short term—and would end up reproducing our disciplinary or departmental structure in the long term.

    While calls for stronger interdisciplinary ties have a long history, in recent years the movement has had a strong wind behind its sails. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have set aside funds for interdisciplinary research, and leading research institutions have undertaken sweeping efforts. For example, in late 2007, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor announced plans to hire 100 faculty members over five years “in areas that advance interdisciplinary teaching and research.” A national survey of faculty members in American colleges, conducted before the current economic crisis by the sociologist Neil Gross, of the University of British Columbia, and colleagues, reveals that interdisciplinarity as a concept is broadly popular with faculty members as well.

    To Read More…

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 8 now available

    The eighth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 8 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 8 now available’

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 7 now available

    The seventh issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 7 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 7 now available’

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 6 now available

    The sixth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 6 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 6 now available’

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 5 now available

    The fifth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 5 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 5 now available’

    How Messy It All Is

    From David Runciman, The London Review of Books

    The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

    The argument of this fascinating and deeply provoking book is easy to summarise: among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming.

    Read more here…

    Against Transparency: The Perils of Openness in Government

    From Lawrence Lessig, Books and Arts

    In 2006, the Sunlight Foundation launched a campaign to get members of Congress to post their daily calendars on the Internet. “The Punch-Clock Campaign” collected pledges from ninety-two candidates for Congress, and one of them was elected. I remember when the project was described to me by one of its developers. She assumed that I would be struck by its brilliance. I was not. It seemed to me that there were too many legitimate reasons why someone might not want his or her “daily official work schedule” available to anyone with an Internet connection. Still, I didn’t challenge her. I was just coming into the “transparency movement.” Surely these things would become clearer, so to speak, later on.

    In any case, the momentum was on her side. The “transparency movement” was about to achieve an extraordinary victory in the election of Barack Obama. Indeed, practically nobody any longer questions the wisdom in Brandeis’s famous remark–it has become one of the reigning clichés of the transparency movement–that “sunlight is … the best of disinfectants.” Like the decision to go to war in Iraq, transparency has become an unquestionable bipartisan value.

    Read more…

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 4 now available

    The fourth issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 4 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 4 now available’

    Views from the Inside

    Views from the Inside: Participant Perspectives on Community Leadership by Joy Murray, Jodi-Lee Rash, Rej Creaton, Peter Cooley and Donna McClelland is available from The Social Sciences imprint.

    This book tells five stories of a three-year leadership capacity building program designed for residents of government housing estates in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs. It tells its stories through the voices of the project leader and four participants. While the project leader explains the workings of the project each of the participants tells how it fitted into their life-story. They talk of their childhood and growing up and sometimes precarious survival at the poor end of town.

    The four insider stories are set beside the program’s intentions as seen by government funding body and program managers, and the philosophical understanding that underpinned the program leader’s actions.

    In so doing the book explores the relationship between: one person’s theory; a community development program in practice; and real life experience. It does this not through a voice of authority commenting on people’s lived experience and attempting to relate this to the theory, but by showing what the program meant to the project leader and what it meant to each of the four participants. It tries to demonstrate, but not explain, how these disparate meanings connected, or otherwise, with the theory that the project leader believed she was applying; and how in the end all knowledge is personal, built up over a life time and stitched together with the threads of our relationships in whatever environment we happen to inhabit.

    Rom Harré, Georgetown University, Washington DC, speaking on social sciences in Cambridge

    Rom Harré, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA
    www.SocialSciencesConference.com

    Rom Harré was for many years the University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at Oxford and Fellow of Linacre College. Currently he is Distinguished Research Professor in the Psychology Department of Georgetown University in Washington DC, teaching there in the Spring Semester. He combines this with the post of Director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social sciences at the London School of Economics. He began his career in mathematics and physics, turning later to the foundations of psychology. More…

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 3 now available

    The third issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 3 contains:

    Continue reading ‘Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 3 now available’

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 2 now available

    The second issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 2 contains:

    Online Presentations

    Please view our online presentations on the Common Ground YouTube site or watch the Social Sciences playlist here.

    2009 Social Conference - Plenary Speaker Added

    Maria Pournari, Department of Primary Education, University of Ioannina, Greece

    www.SocialSciencesConference.com

    Maria Pournari is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Primary Education, University of Ioannina. She has Ph.D. from Dept. of Philosophy (1994), B.A. from Dept. of Mathematics (1984) and B.A. from Dept. Of Philosophy (1988), of the University of Ioannina. Field of Expertise: Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, Cognitive science, Modern Philosophy, Epistemology of Education. Main Publications: David Hume: Critique of Causation as an Attempt towards a “True Metaphysics”, Ph. D. Thesis, University of Ioannina, 1994. (in Greek), David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Of The Understanding, Introduction-Translation (in Greek), Patakis Publication, Athens 2005. Knowledge in the New Technologies, Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2005, and a number of papers and articles on epistemology.

    Social Sciences Journal, Volume 4, Number 1 now available

    The first issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

    Volume 4, Number 1 contains:

    “Israeli Arabs Defiant on ‘Loyalty Laws’ Plan”

    The BBC’s Heather Sharp reports from the Israeli-Arab town of Um al-Fahm, where residents are angry over two proposed laws apparently aimed at increasing their loyalty to the state of Israel. More…

    The Social Sciences Imprint Launched

    Common Ground Publishing has launched the new imprint The Social Sciences.

    There is a selection of books already published and available in the bookstore:

    You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:

    Books should be between 30,000 words and 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.

    Voices from the Coalface

    Voices from the Coalface: Practitioner Perspectives on the Challenges of Community-Based Work edited by John R. Owen and Freidoon Khavarpour is available from The Social Sciences imprint.

    Across Australia the field of social and community-based work is undergoing a significant push toward professionalisation. One only needs to look at the level of tertiary interest in these fields, and the saturation of university courses, to get a sense of this phenomenon. In addition to various units where “practice” and the operations of community-based work are of central concern, a majority of Australian universities and TAFE institutes now offer as a core part of their programs an intensive period of fieldwork practice. However, there are few, if any, books where students and teachers can explore the actual experience of practice in the field. This arises from two fairly obvious conditions. First, that practice is something that cannot be easily rendered into writing. Second, that practice is typically recorded by academics in a scholarly way or conveyed by practitioners either in the course of their doing, or in the compilation of case studies and in the reflective stages of evaluation. Continue reading ‘Voices from the Coalface’

    Social Sciences Journal Volume 3 Complete

    The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, Volume 3 is complete.

    Papers of interest in Volume 3 include:

    With more than 250 papers, published over 12 issues, in Volume 3 there are too many interesting papers for us to mention here. Please have a look through the online bookstore for papers which may be of interest to you.

    Youth Identity and Migration

    Youth Identity and Migration: Culture, Values and Social Connectedness edited by Fethi Mansouri has now been published.

    The key objective of this book is to explore identity and wellbeing among young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds. The chapters collectively explore some of the most critical issues in research into second-generation migrants, namely identity formation, social connectedness and the role of social policy and intervention in dealing with these complex issues.

    The book also focuses on the problematised nature of certain migrant groups, such as Muslim youth in the West. The book consists of thirteen chapters organised around three broad thematic sections, namely: migrant youth identity and social connectedness, focusing on cultural adaptation and wellbeing among migrant youth; global and educational perspectives on the social experiences of migrant youth, focusing in particular on comparative insights from Australia, France and the US; and the interaction of migrant youth with new media and its implications for social connectedness.

    Social Sciences Conference 2009 - Accommodation

    Accommodation for the 2009 Social Science Conference in Athens, Greece may now be booked. Please see the Conference Accommodation webpage for more information.

    Announcing The Fifth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

    2-5 August 2010
    University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
    http://thesocialsciences.com/conference-2010/

    Social Sciences Conference 2009 - Plenary Speakers Added

    Gerassimos Kouzelis, Professor of Philosophy of Science and Sociology of Knowledge; Director of the Laboratory for the Study of Greek-German Relations, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis , Professor of Sociology, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Massimo Leone, Research Professor of Semiotics and Cultural Semiotics, Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy

    Migrant Workers & Ethnic Communities

    Migrant Workers & Ethnic Communities - Their Struggles for Social Justice & Cultural Rights: The Role of Greek-Australians by George Zangalis is now available.

    The ACTU President, Sharan Burrow in her foreword described the work as a “unique contribution to Australian history - lens on union and labour history offers a rich understanding of how multiculturalism developed within a working class environment, through our workplaces, ethnic and migrant associations, our inner city schools and, indeed, the influence on public policy”.

    Dr Michael Tsounis, the doyen of Greek-Australian historians, in his foreword writes: “This study adds a new chapter in understanding the development of Australia as a multi-ethnic and multicultural society… and the role played by Greek-Australians”. The book has several chapters on the history and role of Ethnic Community Councils, Ethnic Affairs Commissions, Ethnic Affairs Ministries and Departments.

    Social Sciences Conference 2009 - Plenary Speakers Added

    Mary Kalantzis, Dean of the College of Education, Professor of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois, Urbana, USA.

    Joleen Steyn-Kotze, Professor of Political Science, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University; winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences awarded by the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.

    Thomas Bley, Professor, Design Studies, University of Otago, Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand

    Kyrkos Doxiadis, Associate Professor, Social Theory with special reference to Communication; Director, Social Theory and Sociology, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    The Fourth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

    8-11 July 2009
    University of Athens, Greece
    www.SocialSciencesConference.com

    Performance and Connection in Electronic Social Networks

    Erika Pearson has an article, All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks, in the latest issue of the journal First Monday. This is the abstract:

    This paper discusses how ideas of performance can be used to conceptualize the play of identity formation on social networking sites (SNS). Linking Goffman’s theories of social performance with Granovetter’s notion of the social tie, this paper will argue that identities on SNS are deliberately constructed performances that straddle the frontstage and the backstage, the public and the private, and in doing so both support and rely upon webs of social connections which engage with fluid or playful identity constructions.

    Indiana University’s 59th Summer Workshop in Slavic, Eastern European, and Central Asian Languages

    19 June-14 August 2009

    Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

    www.indiana.edu/~iuslavic/swseel/

    Complete  1 full academic year of language study in 8 weeks!

    Continue reading ‘Indiana University’s 59th Summer Workshop in Slavic, Eastern European, and Central Asian Languages’

    International Award for Excellence in the area of interdisciplinary social sciences

    Congratulations to Joleen Steyn-Kotze, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the area of interdisciplinary social sciences.

    Joleen Steyn-Kotze’s paper, An Overdue Appraisal: The Need to Rethink Democracy Theory, can be accessed in the online bookstore: http://iji.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.88/prod.629

    Paper abstract: This paper is rooted in democracy and transformative theories as it attempts to identify issues surrounding democracy theory in order to determine whether there is a need to review democracy theory as it stands today. The central purpose of democratic consolidation theory is to determine what will ensure stability and deepening of democracy in emerging democracies. It is widely accepted that democratic consolidation theory centre on conditions that are most conducive to political stability and as such attempt to identify the conditions conducive for political stability. These conditions relate to institutions and regime performance in general. There are however fundamental flaws with democratic consolidation theory. The paper will explore the need to re-evaluate theory in order to obtain a more inclusive interpretation of reality. In essence, theory seems to be missing the point in practice, especially in non-Western contexts.

    Plenary Presenters Papers Published in Volume 3

    Some papers of interest which were published in Volume 3 of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences include those published by plenary presenters at the conference:

    Area Studies versus Disciplines: Towards an Interdisciplinary, Systemic Country Approach by Hans Kuijper.

    Space Conceptualisation in the Context of Postmodernity: Theorizing Spatial Representation by Constantine D. Skordoulis and Eugenia Arvanitis.

    Paper Submissions Open for Volume 4 of the Journal

    Paper submissions are now open for Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.

    You will first need to submit a presentation proposal for the conference as either an attending or virtual participant. If accepted you will be able to submit your full paper for refereeing and possible publication in the Journal.

    Please check the submission guidelines prior to submitting your paper.

    Journal of The Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 2008

    The International Journal of The Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

    Announcing Vicki Adele Pascoe and Kylie Radel of Central Queensland University, Queensland, Australia as winners of the 2008 International Journal of Learning Award for Excellence, for their paper “What are Nice Guys Like them doing in a Place Like that?”: Education Journeys from Australian Indigenous Students in Custody.

    Indigenous Australians have been the subject of long-term disadvantage and discrimination. They are “nearly 16 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous people” (Council of Social Service of New South Wales, 2006, p. 1). Just over one third of Indigenous prisoners have completed primary education as compared to just 16% of non-Indigenous prisoners (Rawnsley, 2003, p. 19). The majority of Indigenous people in custody have little opportunity to intervene in the offending cycle because they lack the education tools. Since 2000 our university has offered a Tertiary Entry Program (TEP) specifically designed for Australian Indigenous people who wish to gain the necessary skills for successful university study. More …