Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

Following The Trail Of Ants: An Examination Of The Work Of E.O. Wilson, Samantha Kee

Writing Across the Curriculum

No abstract provided.

Sociology By Any Other Name: Teaching The Sociological Perspective In Campus Diversity Programs, Meghan Burke, Kira Hudson Banks

Scholarship

This article suggests that the way in to sociology may not always be through the front door. The authors demonstrate how students in a three-day campus diversity program develop a sociological imagination despite not having a formal affiliation with the sociology department. In particular, students demonstrate a move from color blindness into racial consciousness and a shift from individual prejudice into institutional privilege when understanding both diversity issues and their own personal biographies. In short, despite not knowing the phrase, they develop a sociological imagination. While the goal is not to diminish the significance of traditional sociology classrooms, the authors …

Editors' Introduction, Shane Willson, Rachael E. Gabriel

Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum

It is with great pride that we present to you the inaugural issue of Catalyst: A Social Justice Forum. Here we have attempted to create an innovative, peer-reviewed space in which people from numerous disciplines, or even those claiming no discipline, can present research, multimedia, and art aimed at furthering the ideals of social justice, broadly defined. Social justice is not a concept owned by the academy, for attempts to create a more just world can come from many professions, or even from no profession at all. By applying the traditionally academic peer-review process to work done by activists, artists, …

Marcuse On The Two Dimensions Of Advanced Industrial Society And The Significance Of His Thought Today, Michael C. Hartley Mr.

Senior Honors Projects

Herbert Marcuse was a philosopher and social theorist who wrote extensively about the dynamics of social change in the technologically advanced societies of the Western world. Motivated by the desire to see humanity develop societies that would allow for individuals to live a free and happy existence, Marcuse critiqued the existing societies of his time. Although Marcuse’s main work, One-Dimensional Man, is over forty years old, it can continue to offer us new insights today. I believe that Marcuse’s thought offers a powerful framework for analyzing our contemporary society. In this project I distill this framework, what could be …

Critical Race Theory And Education: Mapping A Legacy Of Activism And Scholarship, Kafi D. Kumasi

School of Information Sciences Faculty Research Publications

This chapter explores the intellectual origins and historical precursors of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a lively branch of critical social theory. One of the goals of this work is to help novice educational scholars learn more about the history of CRT and to specifically see how it is used by contemporary scholars in the field of education to address a range of equity issues. The chapter begins by contextualizing contemporary discourse on race and education. It then chronicles the life work of key individuals whose antiracist, anti- colonial ideas and actions helped lay the foundation for the body of legal …

Paper Fish And Policy Conflict: Catch Shares And Ecosystem-Based Management In Maine’S Groundfishery, Jennifer F. Brewer

Geography

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration professes support for ecosystembased fisheries management, as mandated by Congress in the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and as endorsed by the Obama Administration’s national ocean policy. Nonetheless, driving agency policies, including catch shares and fishing quotas, focus principally on individual species, diverting attention from ecosystem considerations such as habitat, migratory patterns, trophic relationships, fishing gear, and firmlevel decision making. Environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO) agendas manifest similar inconsistencies. A case study of Maine’s groundfishery demonstrates implications of this policy conflict at the local level. There, multigenerational fishing villages have historically pursued diversified and adaptive …

Understanding Risk Governance: Introducing Sociological Neoinstitutionalism And Foucauldian Governmentality For Further Theorizing, Wee-Kiat Lim

CCX Research

This article traces the career of risk across prominent theoretical approaches by highlighting their key assumptions and premises, specifically the technical approach found in the physical sciences, and economics, psychology, and sociology in the social sciences. In each discipline, the strengths and limitations of each theoretical approach are pointed out. The discussion focuses on sociology in particular because other approaches—in treating risks as dominantly technical, psychological, or economic phenomena—tend to downplay the broader historical and socio-political context that impinges on risk construction and production, and its differential impact across society. This exploration points out that institutions play an important role …

The Limits Of Control, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Regulation (Discussion), Joshua Hughes

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

When we want to solve a problem, we talk about how we might manage or regulate—control it. Control is a a central concept in systems science, along with system, environment, utility, and information. With his information-theoretic Law of Requisite Variety, Ashby proved that to control a system we need as much variability in our regulator as we have in our system (“only variety can destroy variety”), something like a method of control for everything we want to control. For engineered systems, this appears to be the case (at least sometimes). But what about for social systems? Does a group of …

Lessons From Learning The Craft Of Theory-Driven Research, Michael A. Dover

Social Work Faculty Publications

This paper responds to Richard's Swedberg's call for analysis of the craft of theorizing and to Gabriel Abend's work on the meanings of theory. Their work is applied to a retrospective case study of the theoretical content of the introduction to the author's dissertation. The case study includes lessons drawn from several sections of that chapter: the choice of a research topic; identifying originating, specifying and subsidiary questions; distinguishing between the object and the subject of the research; reviewing the social policy and social science relevance; identifying the relevant research tradition; presenting a general conceptual framework and a specific conceptual …

Kembalinya Subyek: Sosiologi Memaknai Kembali Multikulturalisme, Lucia Ratih Kusumadewi

Masyarakat: Jurnal Sosiologi

The idea of modern society that has been dominated for long time by political idea (read: state) fails since state has lost her control over economy. The state loses as well control over her socio-cultural legitimacy while society became more plural. Sociologists in 80’s inspired by Tourianian’s idea, find that in an ‘ultra-modern’ society, the redefinition on the idea of society, modernity and rationality are inevitable and ‘the return of the Subject’ shall be a main agenda for further sociological analysis. In this context how multiculturalism might be construed? This article has been in attempt to explore the reconstitution of …

What Makes A Meaningful Universe?, Todd Duncan, James Butler

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

A common line of thinking says that although we feel subjectively that our thoughts and actions matter in some way, this perception is an illusion. According to this view, an honest look around at the universe shatters this myth and reveals that our lives are ultimately meaningless. If we are to be hard-nosed realists, limiting ourselves to scientific, evidence-based reasoning, then we must accept that human existence is an inconsequential accident of no ultimate significance in the grand scheme of things. Is this attitude really justified by the evidence? We'll explore this question by taking a step back and asking …

Holism And Human History, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

This paper uses a systems-theoretic model to structure an account of human history. According to the model, a process, after its beginning and early development, often reaches a critical stage where it encounters some limitation. If the limitation is overcome, development does not face a comparable challenge until a second critical juncture is reached, where obstacles to further advance are more severe. At the first juncture, continued development requires some complexity-managing innovation; at the second, it needs some event of systemic integration in which the old organizing principle of the process is replaced by a new principle. Overcoming the first …

If These Men Could Still Talk, Rebecca Damphousse

Academic Symposium of Undergraduate Scholarship

For this assignment, two theorists in psychology were selected to engage in conversation. Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget were chosen and their theories of human development were researched. Erikson was asked how his experiences as a child impacted the formation of his theories. The question for Piaget was directed at the permanence, relevancy and universality of his theory into the 21st century. While a large amount of research was conducted, the questions and answers were pure conjecture.

Reconstructability Analysis Of Elementary Cellular Automata, Martin Zwick, Hui Shi

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Reconstructability analysis is a method to determine whether a multivariate relation, defined set- or information-theoretically, is decomposable with or without loss (reduction in constraint) into lower ordinality relations. Set-theoretic reconstructability analysis (SRA) is used to characterize the mappings of elementary cellular automata. The degree of lossless decomposition possible for each mapping is more effective than the λ parameter (Walker & Ashby, Langton) as a predictor of chaotic dynamics.

Complete SRA yields not only the simplest lossless structure but also a vector of losses of all decomposed structures, indexed by parameter, τ. This vector subsumes λ, Wuensche’s Z parameter, and Walker …

Learning Sustainable Development: Chimeneas De La Esperanza, Miriam V. Mollan Gundersen

Social Sciences

Social inequality and environmental degradation are motivating informed young people into action and connecting impoverished regions of the world with students in more developed nations. This Social Sciences senior project is to analyze an alternative development model designed by a group of Californian university students. The project, named Chimeneas de la Esperanza, is designed to help impoverished Nicaraguan women start a ceramics business. The major hurdle of this mission is to establish a market for the ceramics product. Energy efficient ceramic stoves and smoke ventilating chimneys would benefit the community and avoid an impacted crafts market. The project encompasses ideas …

Criticisms Of Systems Science, Joshua Hughes

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

A new year often begins with a sense of optimism, but we (ever the contrarians) will begin it with a healthy dose of pessimism. This week's seminar will be a discussion about criticisms of systems science. As Winston Churchill said, "Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things." Is the systems project in an unhealthy state? Since its emergence in the 1940s and 1950s, a number of people have believed that to be the case, and a few have …

An Entrepreneurial Approach To Career Development, Connie I. Reimers-Hild

Kimmel Education and Research Center: Presentations and White Papers

This article explains how people can use an entrepreneurial approach to career development in and effort to advance their careers and employment opportunities.

Diversity And Its Discontents: Ambivalence In Neighborhood Policy And Racial Attitudes In The Obama Era, Meghan Burke

Scholarship

This article examines the ways that members of three adjoining stably racially diverse urban communities conceptualize and engage diversity, and the ways in which their discourse and actions are cohesive with federal policies. Making use of interviews with 41 active residents in these communities, I argue that even in liberal, pro-Obama, racially diverse communities, a considerable amount of ambivalence exists in both thought and action connected to diversity, an ambivalence which is cohesive with Obama’s own federal policies that impact neighborhoods like these. The community members define diversity broadly beyond race, are ambivalent about its presence in their community, and …