Sumários
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15 Dezembro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
presentation and discussion of students contributions on international groups work
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24 Novembro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
two subjects were raised: migration and social media studies.
Globalization is about freedom of circulation, except those who are people and out of the new boarders (European Union boarders). Technology help people to get anywhere on the world, for a week-end of see sighting for instance, and migration is done by precarious and fragile means paid many time the price of plane voyages, expending months instead of hours.
New technologies do globalization, except for those who are excluded from using it. Even internet and social media are less able to be segregated, it still is segregated. Less than air voyages.
New opportunities to avoid old borders come with new harder borders, such as walls growing in many places of the world. New technologies come with new segregation practices. Racist politics give justification to that segregation processes and get people support, given the mainstream mindset favorable to accept (instead of repudiating) segregation practices.
Social science also is not enough careful denouncing and avoiding discriminative thoughts and explanations, such as immigrants are poor people that want to get subsidies that western countries distribute to poor people, immigrants lie to get in western countries and, than, betray western values and live as they lived back home.
To social media newcomer is imposed the blaming of fake news. It is not a new problem. Mass media and tabloid media, since the 19 th century, face the same problem. If journalists were able to present clean "facts" to the readers, why the public leave mass media and follow social media?
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17 Novembro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Andrew Sayer wrote in "Why Things Matter to People" that there is a "problem of alienation of contemporary s ocial science" (page 139) . He mentions the split between nature and humans as one aspect of the big divide between body and mind, dirt and pure, hand work and imaginative work, and so on. Social science is alienated from the Earth, from nature.
" it is because of the b ody, not in the first place because of Enlightenment abstraction, that we can speak of morality as universal" ( citado de Eagleton) (page 141). What is universal is that we are all people, from human species. And "When feminism argue that everyone needs care, they are making an important, valid, universalist claim about human nature" (page 142): to have a special living body to deal with, in the first place. Morals is about doing it right.
Several questions were raised by students
, such as what is love and violence?
W
hy asylum seekers suffer ill treatment?
What is social change?
What is society? There are several ways to under
s
tand the meaning of these words.
Being clear about what is the sense and the use of these words by each one is crucial to support mean
ingful discussions, exchange and assessment of ideas.
The support
of
a
clear
signifier
-
meaning
pair benefit from refer to body existence, instead of
avoiding natural-body-dirty world. Suffering, violence, society
, change
must
be understood as bodily events,
biological events,
not only subjective
evanescent
sensations
manipulating communication nets
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10 Novembro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Human Rights soft enforcement conclude for the need of special specific declarations for groups of people especially vulnerable. Universal Human Rights declaration is not so universal. Children, women, migrants, and families, first people, Islamic people has especial declarations of Human Rights. And rights of nature are not (yet?) included on the list of vulnerable entities that need legal protection.
The existence of these specialized declarations means that none of these new declarations can be integrated in the mainstream Human Rights declaration. They need autonomous declaration.
The universality of Human Rights is less than universal without these complements. The modern society mainstream law excludes the added legal subjects. 1789 French Les Droits de L´Homme et du Citoyen was a patriarchal, excluding, and racist political declaration that precede 1948 Human Rights declaration. And, still, patriarchalism, racism, and exclusion is incorporated in this prestigious piece of law.
One can look at it as a progress, and say: now children, women, migrants are protected in law as equals. One can also notice that the law is not what happens in life experiences. It is an institutionalized way to morally protect violation of human rights that resist to be acknowledged by the states. Law exists against social reality, to try to contradict it.
Being so, one must conclude that "minorities" suffer violation of human rights deeper or differently than mainstream people.
Keeping it in mind, what happens in science, regarding hyperspecializing, is a recognition that mainstream social theory do not attend on special subjects. To face this loss, one is called to specialize. One uses mainstream social theory regarding special discriminated subjects, like women (or gender), migrants (or race), poverty, violence, etc. All these categories of people are represented as willing to become socially and legally integrated, as mainstream people (adult national men).
Specialization submits to mainstream social theories (integrative theories) and discuss rivalry (as about integration by the markets or integration by the work) inside the special field of expertise. That situation - hyper-specialization and ideology divide - avoid discussing theories against each other (social theory become a speciality among others) and avoid recognizing that mainstream social theories depend on patriarchal, misogynous, and racist preconcepts incorporated in the main concepts.
All specialization field of social sciences have a critical wing that claim for special attention of mainstream social theory to the questions specially raised in it. Still, mainstream theories claim they are just a part of a big mosaic of specializations that come together opposing each other, opposing natural sciences, and any other kind of knowledge, like traditional knowledge.
The funny personal history I told in class is about a radical critical author that show that all social sciences disciplines are limited by the compliance to each one´s limits in the concert of disciplines and subdisciplines mechanically divided (Kuhn 2016), and, at the same time, he accepts to build a wall between social and natural sciences, claiming that human and nature are impossible to think together.
What is funny about it (not so funny, after all) is that that divide is one of the raisons of the freezing of social action against global warming. Guided by social theories, mainstream and critical, people imagine human action to have no impact in nature. Regarding the situation, the critical approaches in social science, radical they may be, stops at the door, since nature is out of the scope of social sciences.
1. It is stressful to understand that nothing in social sciences seems to please the teacher. How can one look for comfort on engaging in a course that the teacher says mostly of what is being learned is rubbish?
Tentative answers: a) this sociology course, according to the pools, do not serve a special profession. Half of sociology students do not work in any sociology related job, and one third only use sociology in a lateral way. What you learn at university has not many future consequences; b) to develop knowledge is stressful. Not to develop knowledge is energy saving.
2. How come the teacher can possibly be right against the rest of the world?
Tentative answers: a) science is not democratic: scientific truth depends not on authority but on reality test; b) that is the job a teacher, to know everything about what his/her expertise is, opposing the common sense.
What I really try to teach you is that there are instruments to avoid social sciences (and science) errors, namely the artificial and damaging divide between social sciences and natural sciences. I mention you Planetary Thinking (Clark and Szerszynski 2021) and Big History (Christian 2021). I can mention other old and new efforts in the same sense. I mention also concepts such as "estados de espírito", Imperial "estado de espírito", centripetal versus centrifugal science, or universal substrate, all currently in use in my work.
references:
Christian, David. 2021. "Education Revolution with Big History." Frontiers. 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhowXxz_uAs.
Clark, Nigel, and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2021. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press. https://books.google.pt/books/about/Planetary_Social_Thought.html?id=nf4FEAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y.
Kuhn, Michael. 2016. How the Social Sciences Think about the World´s Social - Outline of a Critique. Stuttgard: Ibidem. https://www.kobo.com/us/pt/ebook/how-the-social-sciences-think-about-the-world-s-social-1.
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3 Novembro 2021, 09:00 • Rita Sousa
Workers´ movements become part of the official Western history. They show modern proletariat opposition to modernization, or socialist state opposition to bourgeois state. It is the symbol of democratic and social integrated opposition to capitalism: unions and workers political parties that accept to join capitalism and collaborate in developing every country under international community coordination, under globalization.
Some feminists say women´s movements are much older than workers movements. They may be right. Still, in Western Europe, the social state (European welfare state developed under the New Deal) gives a special status to social partners (unions and corporations) that design with the government socio-economic state policies.
New social movements (starting the 70's) develop women´s, students´, and ecological special separate claims, copying the way workers´ movements gain political protagonism. They stay out of the frame of social partnership and claim for special public policies to address each movement agenda.
Ecological movements developed political parties. Still, not enough state´s attention has been achieved to environment risks.
School sciences and social sciences are presented as disciplines and subdisciplines that represent professional technological recipes to standardized problems. This blocks the part of sciences that study "universal substrate", that support holistic questions that are not easy to answer and need attention and research efforts. Workers´ movements turn into representatives of the single way of opposing and collaborating with the state and capitalism, narrowing the imagination of different futures for societies and institutions systems. The social relations with nature (and between sexes, and within schools, etc.) become hidden from politics, difficult to translate in socio-economic terms and its structural change out of the question.