Sumários
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4 Maio 2021, 16:00 • Rita Sousa
via zoom
Presentation and discussion of subjects raised by the students.
Remembering the call for the final paper.
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27 Abril 2021, 16:00 • Rita Sousa
Via zoom
Stundents´ presentations of the stage of their work at the moment.
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20 Abril 2021, 16:00 • Rita Sousa
Via zoom
The violence subjects of four students were presented and discussed regarding the methodogical task ahead.
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13 Abril 2021, 16:00 • Rita Sousa
To draw a methodological plan is not enough to choose a research technique or between a quantative versus qualitative approach.
What is the main exercise I ask the students to develop for the next and third assignment is a) to find what is there to be discovered b) how to manage the data production in a way it deliver evidence about what we want to discover.
Science is about discovering, uncovering what is hidden. Violence is hidden and those who engage on it, both as victims and as abusers, have especial interest on hiding violence. Social science theories also hide violence, for instance, declaring it rare (as Collins does) or anti-social (as Wieviorka does). Conceive violence as half part of life experience, compared to breathing in, alternating with estado de espírito production, compared to breathing out, violence as reduction to the body (as Reemptsma define it), one has a lot of violence to uncover.
To do the job one has to avoid moralism. Moralism presents violence as rare as the violent person, as anti-social as the enemies. This humanity divides between those few violent enemies and the rest of the non-violent humanitarian humans is moralistic and unrealistic. Orwell famously describe this in Animal Farm, stating that we are all equal but some between us are more equal than others.
Scientific approach to violence must break with moralism and with mainstream social theories that engage in hiding violence in human societies, as a way to discriminate between allegedly sacred human life (of part of humanity) and the rest of the world to be explored (nature and its human resources). Please, be critical to legal, social sciences, institutional definitions of violence.
One way to develop scientific social theory is to bridge to biology. You may read António Damásio´s books for inspiration. I wrote a short note on this you can link at the begging of this summary.
To develop a discovery methodology on human violence is hard. We need to engage in in-depth dialogue with those few interested in this uncover work. That is what we will do in class for the next three zoom schedules that will end our course. I need your initiative and cooperation to discover the difficulties we experiment and we will try to overcome them together.
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23 Março 2021, 16:00 • Rita Sousa
via zoom
Science is not about a perfect description such as a map of the same size of reality it describes. One must choose the way to make a reduction of the description making sense of it. This sense must be higher than reality itself: science is making simple mindful sense out of empirical complexity. Moralism, religion, dogma, ideology are non-scientific ways to do the job. Social science must learn how to reconnect with real human flesh and blood emphatic experience, delivering short structural descriptions open to renewal.
Objective structure is not found in the specificity of events. Specificity hides what is going on, because humans look with their minds: we reduce in our minds what happens to make sense of it. Science oppose to other forms of knowledge to maximize empirical events influence in the process of knowing and open it to social collaboration of anyone who wants to contribute.
One finds objective structures of human social life in what each event has in common with all the events one can imagine. Describing structures is a productive cognitive way of descriptive reduction. Structure means what is common to humankind and not only to each culture. For science sake, one needs to overcome cultural biases. Looking for the social structures is having conscious of what unite humankind as opposed to over value what divide human beings. What unite humankind is also what divide us: the structures we build and pass through heritage to those that follow.
Violence is structural within life experience on Earth, let alone within humankind experience. The common sense and common social theory divide in good violence and bad violence is religious driven. It hides the heritage of incorporated violence that is transparent to us. The incorporated violence becomes habitual. So, violence structural consequences for the life chances of humanity and of each person is hidden by moralistic modernity ideologies. One can opposed to it zoom out and zoom in scientific analysis to deconstruct moralism. Time analysis and hope and endurance analysis of personal and social growing from experience (including violence and estado-de-espírito, looking to breathing in - reduction to the body; incorporating - and breathing out - expressing oneself; developing capabilities - alike dynamic).
Galvanizing people, as social movements, is not a rare event. What is rare is many people sharing the same "emerging as new" (estado-nascente, Francesco Alberoni´s Genesis). Modern knowledge, including social sciences´ knowledge, is about avoiding fusional estados-de-espírito, big mobs united for a long time. Modernity worship revolution as much it fears it. Modern moralism on violence is about dealing with worshiping good violence and fearing bad violence. History shows that bad and good violence, violence and estado-de-espírito, are not distinct: they come together.
What science needs to understand is what makes violence glorious (as in sport) even when one loses, and what makes violence abusive even when one is dominant.