Methodological Turn Research Articles

The Methodological Turn on ‘Justification of Inequality/Disolution’ previous and the subsequent era of the State-of-National-Emergency Declaration

The Methodological Turn on ‘Justification of Inequality/Disolution’ previous and the subsequent era of the State-of-National-Emergency Declaration

Fiction into religion: imagination, other worlds, and play in the formation of community

Research into religions founded upon explicitly fictional sources is a recent development in the study of religion. Such research is social scientific in orientation and emphasises: the persuasive power of shared narratives among subcultural groups; the ‘cognitive’ methodological turn that has gained ground since the 1980s regarding the origin and function of religion; and the individualistic and affective ways that elements from traditional religion, popular culture, and a wide range of social artefacts and phenomena are used to create new religions and personal spiritualities. In certain cases, exposure to, prolonged immersion in, and social vindication of highly affective narratives (science-fiction novels and films that are sensuous and have tangible impact in experiential terms) may trigger the formation of a religion. This article examines the Church of All Worlds, which is a fiction-inspired religion founded by Tim Zell (b. 1942) and Lance Christie (1944–2010), two students at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, in April 1962. Zell and Christie read Robert A. Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (London: New English Library, 1961 [1987]), and initiated a ‘real world’ version of the fictional Church, founded by Martian-raised Valentine Michael Smith in the novel. Identification with Stranger’s characters, and lifestyle choices designed to recreate the social milieu of the novel, reinforced and made ‘real’ this initially fiction-based religion, which is now over 50 years old, has a vibrant print and online presence, and braches (called Nests) in countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, and Australia.

A Society Apart: Rural Chinese Catholics and the Historiography of ‘Otherness’

This article examines the theme of ‘otherness’ in historical scholarship on rural Chinese Catholic communities. Whereas studies of the Jesuit Mission in China tend to emphasise the potential harmony between Christianity and elite Confucian culture, a methodological turn towards local history during the 1980s and 90s has revealed that ‘otherness’ or ‘separation’ may be a more helpful heuristic lens for understanding the situation of the vast majority of Catholics in rural China. This article surveys English-language and Chinese-language micro-histories of rural villages. It maps three general historiographical views by which historians explain Catholic villagers’ ‘otherness’ as the result of cultural dissonance, socio-economic inequality or relative political power. By periodising these centuries of history according to the feasibility of opting out of mainstream society, this article seeks to show how Chinese Catholic identity continues to be forged at the ever-moving borderline between Catholic and non-Catholic society.

Revolution and Revelation, or, When is History Too Soon?

ABSTRACTIf historiography is ordered by a series of thematic and methodological turns, then it is not hard to demonstrate that there has in recent years been a turn towards revolutionary histories of South Asia. Scholars have begun to transcend the limitations of Gandhian frameworks in search of more dynamic understandings of Indian pasts that factor in the role of violence, subterfuge and conspiracy in South Asian anti-colonial struggles. But what happens when new methodologies and narratives begin to destabilise or even invert longstanding historical readings that have been the basis for generations of academic knowledge of the past? When, and under what political and institutional conditions, are fresh interpretations of history sayable? Can historical trajectories or interpretations be quickly turned or must they evolve slowly? This paper is a self-reflexive critique of the ways in which radical histories can—or cannot—be written in the post-colonial moment, with reference to the compulsions brought to bear in the writing of revolutionary history. This article considers these historiographical issues alongside compelling evidence of the involvement of Jawaharlal and Motilal Nehru in key aspects of the revolutionary actions of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association.

Architectural History

In January 2015 a group of historians from both sides of the Atlantic gathered around a seminar table at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich to present research engaged in historicizing the relationships between architecture and technology.1 Given the symposium's title, Architecture/Machine, one could be forgiven for jumping to assumptions about the historical and theoretical subject matter based on the well-worn motif that has long underpinned conventional narratives about modern architecture: architecture as machine. For the most part, however, this metaphor and the various philosophically driven machine-related metaphors that have accrued over the past century were alien to the work of these scholars. The experts who gathered in the seminar room, including historians of architecture, science, and media studies, were more intent on what was represented by the three words of the event's subtitle, which followed the options implied by the “and/or” construct of the main title: programs, processes, and performances. These words signaled a methodological turn from investigations of machinelike metaphor or sociotechnical historical constructions toward a mode of research that attempts to track the concrete procedural networks and the materiality of cultural techniques that precondition architecture prior to its end form. At the Machine/Architecture conference the issue of whether or not architectural history is a media theoretical problem was not in question. The contents of the seventeen papers presented spanned more than two hundred years of history and engaged varied approaches to history and to architecture and its technologies. The differing approaches to research and analysis yielded much debate, which rarely succumbed to tendentiousness, as few presenters sought to close in on consensus regarding particular modes of working. The culture-laden semantic assumptions captured by the blinding sweep of the machine metaphor were displaced by approaches that looked to the heuristic of the technical a priori.2 …

The Making and Unmaking of Patent Ownership: Technicalities, Materialities, and Subjectivities

Feminist sociolegal studies have recently taken up the technicalities of doctrines, documents, and regulations to better understand the law. In an affiliated move, feminist science studies turned to the materialities of theories, practices, and nonhuman organisms to make critical sense of science. These methodological turns focus not on gender, per se, but on precise mechanisms of law and science that structure, reinforce, and reconfigure power and inequality. Drawing on these methodological approaches, this article attends to the technicalities and materialities of patent ownership and benefit sharing in South Africa in regards to San peoples’ struggles over the patenting of the Hoodia gordonii plant. An examination of patent documents, benefit‐sharing agreements, legislative appendixes, and the biology of plants generates an understanding of how patent ownership, rather than being natural or value‐neutral, is a historical and sociocultural process shaping, refashioning, and being inscribed across multiple scales of nation‐state jurisdictions, divergent ways of knowing, and biochemical orderings of plants.

The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms 1958–1988 by Susan Z. Andrade (review)

Reviewed by: The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms 1958–1988 by Susan Z. Andrade Olakunle George Susan Z. Andrade. The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. ix + 252 pp. The last decade has witnessed renewed scholarly interest in non-Western literatures and traditions. There is a distinct aspect to this new tide of interest having to do with methodological turns in literary studies and global developments beyond academia. The methodological turns I have in mind include the naturalization—some will say domestication—of postcolonial studies, feminism, and Western Marxism, while the global historical development is the post-9/11 heightening of anxieties over terrorism, international conflicts, and the perceived clash of cultures. One sign of these developments is the currency of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and world literature in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. As labels of methodological alignment or ethical-political vision, these terms are fashionable in a good way: potentially, they may yield new ways of affiliating and understanding the texts of culture. And yet, under the sign of cosmopolitanism and world literature, the gains in theoretical sharpness are often attenuated by losses in historical grounding and attention to the local complexities of these literatures as sites of humanistic knowledge. Susan Z. Andrade’s The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988 is best appreciated if it is located against this background. The book contributes to transnational literary studies by bringing the evidence of African fiction to the table. The Nation Writ Small scores high points on two ends of the playing field, so to speak. On the one hand, it contributes to African studies by bringing theoretical insights from feminism, postcolonial theory, and Marxism, thereby compelling a rethinking of some of the clichés of the field. At the same time, the [End Page 547] book contributes to transnational literary studies by leavening broad conceptual issues with fine-tuned readings of African “fictions and feminisms.” The Nation Writ Small is divided into a substantial introduction and four chapters devoted, respectively, to Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta; Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Ba, and Sow Fall; Tsitsi Dangarembga and Nuruddin Farah; and Assia Djebar. Andrade’s introduction frames the book’s analytical procedure by carefully navigating around what might be called the image-analysis of Florence Stratton’s Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994) and the “anti-reflectionist” stance of Olakunle George’s Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003). Andrade argues that Stratton’s feminist book is one-dimensional, restricted as it is to analyses of images in terms of accuracies or distortions. Andrade rejects the schematism and tautology of Stratton’s critique of male writers, whereby ideological limitations are accounted for simply on the basis of sexism or writers’ identities as male subjects. For Andrade, “Stratton seems to assume that there is a single, correct way to represent men and women … and that the measure of a work lies in the truthfulness of its representation” (14). Moving beyond this, Andrade’s strategy is to consider the interplay of form and content, as well as the complex work of culture that representations perform. Turning to Relocating Agency, Andrade faults George for being “too committed to exposing the gap between the social and the representative to engage the relation of the aesthetic to the cognitive” (16). The cost is that George ends up giving short shrift to content. I take this to mean that a covert formalism, or worse, weak aestheticism, results from George’s hostility to reflectionist criticism. Full disclosure: as the author of Relocating Agency, I sometimes do not recognize the book’s arguments in Andrade’s claims about its polemical excesses. But my (non-neutral) reservation aside, the construal of mimesis-representation that she elicits is sound: “Once something has been represented in words or visual images, the world has been altered or transformed, for now the object exists alongside the representation, the object, and some form of itself that is also not itself” (17). Given the promise she sees in Georg Lukács’s approach to realism, it makes sense that she finds Fredric Jameson’s “Third-World Literature in the Era of...

Ivan the Terrible and the Other in current history-writing

Since the 1990s the retrospective of Russian and East-European Early-Modern societies has largely benefited from several methodological turns. Objects and profiles of the past reinterpreted in cultural terms are emerging against the anthropological background. This trend does not proceed to better consent in the historical community; rather it reconciles them against Soviet interpretations of the past. In the times of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union the East-European Early-Modern period was conceptualized in terms of “growth”, understood as a strengthening of the rulership and concentration of territories under the power of monarchs – grand dukes, later tsars, of Moscow and kings of the “Jagiellonian Empire”.

Practices and Principles: On the Methodological Turn in Political Theory

AbstractThe question of what role social and political practices should play in the justification of normative principles has received renewed attention in post‐millennium political philosophy. Several current debates express dissatisfaction with the methodology adopted in mainstream political theory, taking the form of a criticism of so‐called ‘ideal theory’ from ‘non‐ideal’ theory, of ‘practice‐independent’ theory from ‘practice‐dependent’ theory, and of ‘political moralism’ from ‘political realism’. While the problem of action‐guidance lies at the heart of these concerns, the critics also share a number of methodological assumptions. Above all, their methodology is practice‐dependent in the sense that an existing (social, political, or institutional) practice is assumed to put substantial limitations on the appropriate normative principles for regulating it. In other words, we cannot formulate and justify an appropriate principle without first understanding the practice (or its point and purpose) this principle is supposed to govern. The aim of this paper is to map out and analyze the common denominators of these debates with regard to methodological commitments. We will investigate how this practice‐dependent method may be understood and motivated. In particular, we point to challenges that must be met in order for the position to remain both distinct and attractive.

Human dignity and the business of business

Abstract A paradigm change from mechanistic to humanistic management theories and practices is underway, exemplified in a shift from an economics oriented at the fictional homo oeconomicus towards novel models oriented at the real conditio humana. This methodological turn brings about both the opportunity and the necessity of re-orienting management theory as well as business education to the idea of human dignity, as was common in the long-tradition of moral economics from Plato up to Adam Smith. In order to contribute to this theoretical move, in its first part, this paper surveys important conceptions of dignity throughout the ages, and then, in the second part, discusses their implications for a future humanistic business education.

Border Crossing: Feminist Sinologies through a Southeast Asian Lens

Wendy Law-Yone’s 2010 novel The Road to Wanting offers a Southeast Asian lens through which one might examine China’s southwestern frontier and relationships forged within the Sino-Myanmar borderlands. The Road to Wanting maps an intersectional, interracial terrain where the past is selectively developed through transnational joint ventures and promises of an improved future with localized flair, a speculative modernity that is fabricated by bodies differentially marked by minoritization, mobility, and capital. Offering a view of “the Wild West of China,” the novel highlights the interactions among peripheral and marginalized populations that are often homogenized in ethnonationalist terms (e.g., as Chinese, Zhonghua minzu, or Burmese). My analysis highlights how Law-Yone’s polyphonic play within this multilingual contact zone generates alternative paradigms for transnational encounters and translocal affective affinities. The essay suggests that an expansive notion of Chinese women’s studies might adapt or borrow from recent transnational and methodological turns in ethnic minority studies and US critical race studies that analyze not only the hegemonies operating within one’s own “home” field (read: nation, race, ethnicity, or discipline) but also imperialistic relationships with a nation’s internal others and geopolitical margins. In this way, then, a transnationally inflected model of feminist sinologies can productively consider the politics of knowledge in the study of Chinese women and men while keeping in mind the effects of Chinese capital and geopolitical power in the nation, in the region, and in the heterogeneous formations of sinophone studies. My reading therefore endeavors to realign our view of what might constitute China studies, feminist sinologies, and Asian/American writing in an increasingly globalized and transnational world.

The Methodological Turn in Philosophy

Controversies have always characterized philosophy as expression of its typical critical attitude that depends on the complexity of the fundamental philosophical issues. Traditionally these discrepancies regarded the answers given to certain questions and, therefore, the content of the opposite doctrines, as all legitimately belonging to philosophy. With modernity the determination of the correct method of thinking becomes the necessary precondition for philosophizing and represents the core of the philosophical activity itself. As a consequence people adopting a certain method of thinking often qualify as non-philosophical the discourse of those who do not belong to their methodological school, independently of the content of the doctrine they defend. This dominance of the methodological concern, on the contrary, has produced the discovery and deepening of several “thinking methods,” whose plurality must be considered a wealth and not a reason for skepticism, since it can offer to philosophy the tools for better coping with the increasing complexity of its fundamental issues.

Indigenous Taiwan as Location of Native American and Indigenous Studies

In her article "Indigenous Taiwan as Location of Native American and Indigenous Studies" Hsinya Huang uses Taiwan as a specific intellectual crossroads to examine, both pedagogically and theoretically, transnational/trans-Pacific flows, as well as transnational indigenous formations which take shape across national/international/local American Studies in this key moment of heightened U.S./Taiwan interaction in the Asia-Pacific security zone. Huang argues that Taiwanese scholarship has helped reorient understandings of environment and ecocriticism and that it has provided significant impulses, especially in the fields of Native American and comparative indigenous studies. Moreover, Taiwan has contributed both in its own positioning and in its academic outreach to the recent methodological turns away from US-American exceptionalism by decentering the U.S. in global/transnational studies. Huang explores comparative indigeneity as experienced through the lens of Taiwan's aboriginal people and offers a comparative perspective on the teaching of Native American literatures in Taiwan. Huang's study reflects and refracts the diverse dimensions of empire and resistance surrounding Taiwan as a site of methodological and pedagogical shifts.

Krasiński rocznicowy (jeszcze jedna kartka z dziejów recepcji)

Analysing the history of reception of Krasinski’s works, we are able to see that in some periods the poet was an individual engaged in various critical and literary disputes, methodological turns and anniversary celebrations. In this respect none of the great romanticists experienced similar ups and downs or praise and rejection, which were familiar to the author of Irydion . Cherished and ruthlessly attacked; highly acclaimed and degraded. For some people he was the author of the masterpiece unprecedented in literature, for others he was the author of “brilliant kitsch”. Some individuals still perceive him as “alive”, whereas for others he is forgotten. Considering the complicated history of “the myth of the three bards” and the reception of Zygmunt Krasinski’s works, it has to be said that only at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s – on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Krasinski’s death – the author of Nie-Boska komedia was rehabilitated and situated in the right place in the history of Romanticism and Polish literature.

Hackers in Hiding: a Foucaultian Analysis

On several occasions Michel Foucault advocated a methodological turn towards what he called a ‘happy positivism’. Foucault’s emphasis on the surface does not deny the importance of structures of hiding, but understands it as a game in which the structures of hiding are viewed as contingently given. In this paper, I will analyse the conflict between the hacker movement and the field of corporate interests. I argue that the introduction of graphical user interfaces and the maintaining of copyright interests are the contingent background of the ongoing conflict. By bracketing the analyses of hidden intentional structures, the happy positivist is thus able to facilitate deeper understandings of the prevailing structures of hiding.

Creative interactions with data: using visual and metaphorical devices in repeated focus groups

This article presents some of the emergent methods developed to fit a study of quality in inclusive research with people with learning disabilities. It addresses (i) the ways in which the methodology was a response to the need for constructive, transformative dialogue through use of repeated focus groups in a design interspersing dialogic and reflective spaces; and (ii) how stimulus materials for the focus groups involved imaginative and creative interactions with data. Particular innovations in the blending of narrative and thematic analyses and data generation and analysis processes are explored, specifically the creative use of metaphor as stimulus and the playful adaptation of I-poems from the Listening Guide approach as writing and performance. In reflecting on these methodological turns we also reflect on creativity as an interpretive lens. The paper is an invitation for further methodological dialogue and development.

Meta-data, same-sex marriage and the making of ‘terrorists’

This essay takes up Jasbir Puar's convincing contention that scholars who work to prevent some forms of violence render other forms of violence (against differently racialised, gendered, sexed, and class- and nation-marked populations) more likely. Complicity with the militarism, securitisation and secularism that make up the ‘strategies, and logistics of our contemporary war machines’, as Jasbir Puar describes it (2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), is not a new issue within religious studies. However, Puar's methodological turn to ‘assemblages’ over ‘identities’ may help scholars create analyses not as subject to instrumentalisation within such sectors. Despite these strengths, Puar's conception of fundamentalism and its relationship to what she calls ‘queer secularity’ requires rethinking.

Interpreting autobiographies in migration research: narratives of Japanese returnees from the Canary Islands (Spain)

Within the context of recent epistemological and methodological turns in geography and social sciences, this paper explores the use of autobiographical narratives in international migration research and learning through the analysis of three books written by Japanese returnees from the Canary Islands (Spain). These narratives were interpreted by focusing on their content from a categorical perspective, using a type of reading known traditionally as ‘content analysis’ and adopting a cross‐cultural framework of research, reflecting a biographical approach to the study of embodied experiences of migration and cross‐cultural processes. A major finding in this study is the recognition of migration and mobility as transformative experiences that changed the authors’ way of looking at the world and have had a profound impact on every aspect of their lives. The article emphasises the importance of reflexivity, positionality and communicative competence between cultures in geography.

Pragmatism and post-qualitative futures

This paper notes that there has been a relatively recent revision of the pragmatist philosophy canon, one that moves beyond a focus on epistemic and pedagogical theories, and locates pragmatism in a tradition of radical ontological theorizing and political action. This essay examines this revision for its relevance to the emerging materialist turn in qualitative research methodology. The essay focuses on two themes within contemporary and classical pragmatist philosophy: a reflexive realism and an ontology of the future. The methodological implications of these features are explored in detail. These implications are compared to post-structuralist conceptions of reflexivity that informed the last wave of qualitative research innovation and to the new materialism theories that are inspiring a new wave of methodological innovation. The most significant methodological implications of pragmatic philosophy are located in its ideas about the ontologically co-constituting relationship between inquiry practice and future possibilities.

Editorial: Formal epistemology meets experimental philosophy

In the past few years, there has been an increasing tendency in the application of formal and experimentalmethods to tackle philosophical issues.Weverymuch approve of this trend,whichweviewas part and parcel of the recent renewal of “scientific philosophy”: In our mind, the aim of a scientifically oriented philosophy is to adopt formal and experimental methods to address philosophical questions. A distinguishing feature of contemporary scientific philosophy is that the use of formal and experimental methods is not confined to areas such as the philosophy of science, of mathematics, or of physics. Quite the contrary: This research program applies its broad toolkit of formal and experimental practices to a very large range of philosophical areas. For instance, in the philosophy of cognitive science, the development ofmathematicalmodels of concepts representation has proved to be an innovative way to compare normative theories against empirical results. In the philosophy of economics, agent-based models have been used to explore the notion of causality used in economics. More generally, different areas of philosophy—from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of cognitive science, and from ethics to the philosophy of economics—have become increasingly scientific and characterized by a highly interdisciplinary approach. In tandem with this methodological turn, the dispute about whether philosophy should appeal to formal or experimental methods has made a comeback: Experimental philosophers defend the use of empirical methods as a means of exploring