Traditional Social Science Research Articles

Exposing Color Blindness/Grounding Color Consciousness

As teacher educators we have been struck by the consistency, urgency, and frequency in which students employ color-blind perspectives. This orientation has negative consequences in K-12 settings. In this manuscript, we lay out the multiple meanings of color blindness, drawing from legal, educational, and social science traditions, and offer arguments for color consciousness in education. In addition, we use this theoretical perspective to investigate interventions for countering color blindness in teacher education. Using a framework steeped in the tenets of color consciousness, we draw from scholars as well as our own work to provide interventions designed to challenge color-blind orientations in teachers.

Life Course, Social Determinants, and Health Inequities: Toward a National Plan for Achieving Health Equity for African American Infants—a Concept Paper

Despite the best efforts by the public health community, the existence of disparity in African American infant mortality appears to be insurmountable. Eliminating this disparity is the public health challenge of the next decade. The public health community has engaged in copious activity regarding the identification and analysis of the etiology of health disparities. The resulting literature is substantial, yet, despite well-meaning interventions that have had varying degrees of success, the problem is so daunting that there has been very little progress in developing a comprehensive national plan to eradicate health disparities, in general, and, African American infant-mortality disparities, in particular. The process of identifying the causal pathways and risks of adverse African American birth outcomes could potentially impact the elimination of other health disparities since infant outcomes are the foundation for adult health. Unfortunately, as a nation, we have never deliberately invested the time and resources into developing an evidence base specific to the achievement of health equity. This endeavor will require dedicated resources, creativity, and a breadth of vision to work within, and exceed, the limits of traditional epidemiological and social science theory and methods. The literature cites various causes of overall disparities, including adverse health behaviors like smoking or drug use, poor nutrition, inadequate health care, and stress, to name a few [1]. The World Health Organization (WHO) Commission on Social Determinants of Health considers the major contributors to health disparities to be the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age [2]. In the United States, ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans, are more likely to be in socially and economically vulnerable positions. A number of studies have demonstrated that even while controlling for SES, racial and ethnic disparities are still found in health outcomes [3]. For example, African American women in Illinois at the highest education level have higher, i.e., worse low-birthweight rates than women of any other ethnicity at lower strata. The process that determines social stratification leading to poorer health outcomes is rooted in history, and while it is not about ‘‘race’’ as a risk factor, scientific investigation has resulted in a corpus of knowledge that places racism, perceived acts of racism, poverty, socialenvironment degradation, and violence into the etiological pathway [4–10]. These manifestations of ‘‘social ecology’’ are the type that WHO describes as resulting in unfair and avoidable differences in health status [2]. Some think that because racism is a causal factor, any quest for solutions may be doomed to failure, because, as one funding institution’s peer reviewer stated, ‘‘It is not a good investment of [our] dollars to study racism [as a cause of health disparities], because even if we fund something, there is nothing we can do about it’’ [11]. However, pre-term birth (PTB) and low birth weight (LBW) are the causes of firstyear mortality for African American infants. Therefore, understanding and eliminating the factors that cause high rates of PTB and LBW should remain at the forefront. V. K. Hogan (&) ! D. Rowley ! T. Bennett Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 425 Rosenau Hall, 421 Pittsboro Street, 135 Dauer Drive, Campus Box 7445, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA e-mail: vhogan@email.unc.edu

From the page to the screen to augmented reality: New modes of language-driven technology-mediated research

On 12 July 2010 a group of artists, poets, writers, researchers and academics met up at Kingston University for a roundtable discussion convened by myself, Maria Mencia. Sitting around the tabl were Professor Jay David Bolter, director of the Wesley New Media Center and Wesley Chair of New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Dr Serge Bouchardon (University of Technology of Compiegne, FR); Dr Scott Rettberg (Digital Cuture – UiB); Dr Maria Engberg (Blekinge Technical Institute, SWE); Talan Memmott (Blekinge Technical Institute, SWE); Dr Zuzana Husarova (Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia); Dr Laura Borras Castanyer (University of Barcelona SP); Kate Pullinger (De Montfort University, UK); Jorg Piringer (Independent, Austria); Dr Alexandra Saemmer (Paris 8-FR); Dr Thiresia Spilioti (Kingston University, UK); Dr Korina Giaxoglou (Kingston University, UK); Jerome Fletcher (University College Falmouth, UK); Prof. Martin Rieser (Institute of Creative Technologies and The Faculty of Art and Design at De Montfort, UK); Fiona Curran (Kingston University, UK); Judith Watts (Kingston University, UK) and Dr Maria Mencia (Kingston University, UK). There are a number of reasons why I wanted to organize this event. First, I wanted to use this workshop as a preliminary meeting in order to develop a ‘language-driven technology-mediated’ collaborative research practice, inviting scholars, writers, theoreticians and creative practitioners from Kingston University and other European universities to discuss the relevance of new technologies in the creation of language-mediated practice, viewing language in a very broad way using different modes: image-sound-text. Second, although most of the work presented at the roundtable is part of the curriculum at various universities, the mainstream literary institutions and traditional social sciences departments at universities are still not aware of the work produced in electronic literary and artistic practices. Thus, I thought this could offer an opportunity to gather together and to initiate a dialogue between writers, theoreticians and creative practitioners coming from a more print-based background, but who might also be considering the use of new technologies in their research practice, as well as international researchers who have migrated from more traditional print-based research practices to multimedial and interdisciplinary research methods that make use of computers, networks and mobile technologies. This would help to identify areas of overlap between different research practices, such as traditional humanities, practice-led new media research projects, and multimedial and interdisciplinary research methods, which make use of computers, mobile technologies and networks platforms. (M.Mencia)

Cultural Experience in Context: Sense-Making the Arts

Recent research on arts and cultural audiences has attempted to go beyond the traditional social science surveys that assess attitudes or attendance to capture an understanding of how audiences actually experience the arts and what benefits or impacts those experiences provide. The study reported here contributes to this growing body of research by presenting in-depth case studies of four individuals and their chosen cultural experiences at various times through their lives. The authors used Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology to guide the informants through highly structured but open-ended interviews designed to prompt self-reflection and elaboration of what each experience meant to them. Informants were selected from a larger database because of the richness of their interviews and the insight these interviews offer to the understanding of people's engagements with culture. By considering multiple cultural experiences for each informant, it was possible to gain a clearer sense of the context in which these experiences took place and how informants were impacted personally. In addition, the case studies showed how informants' respective struggles with personal and identity issues moved with them across their cultural experiences.

Utopian Performatives and the Social Imaginary: Toward a New Philosophy of Drama/Theater Education

Abstract Drama/theater education lives in the tension of being a discipline rooted in the fine arts and humanities that has been transplanted into the social science of education. This paper suggests that a more aesthetic and philosophical reflection on what drama/theater does and can do in educational settings frees us from the scientized and instrumental concerns of more traditional social science research approaches in education. In this regard, and in moving toward the articulation of a new philosophy for drama/theater education (and its sister field of applied drama/theater), the recent work of performance theorist Jill Dolan and philosopher Charles Taylor is presented. Dolan’s notion of the utopian performative suggests that in certain performance contexts, spectators experience fleeting yet powerful “glimpse[s] of utopia” based on feelings of deep empathy and “lucid intersubjective understanding.” Taylor’s philosophy of the social imaginary suggests that society itself is created and sustained by collective acts of the imagination that are constantly in flux and flow and are possible to harness in the cause of social justice and change. Drawing on the work of these thinkers, and selected others, a new philosophical way of seeing drama/theater education as the collective creation of socially imagined performative utopias is offered for further consideration and development.

Can terrorism become a scientific discipline? A diagnostic study

This study offers a meta-information analysis of the state of the art of terrorism research from structural disciplinary perspectives, and by comparisons with several other fields of study. It observes the interrelationship of disciplinary characteristics, specifically, scientific collaboration among terrorism researchers, the growth rate in the number of conferences in the field after 9/11 and the fragmentation of terrorism studies into separate research specialties. These three trends coincide, indicating the growing importance and visibility of terrorism and counter-terrorism studies for government decision-makers and an increase in funding for this research, much of which is channelled in specific desired directions. The new research on terrorism has created disciplinary studies on the subject in the sciences and the life sciences, side by side with traditional social science research. The fragmentation of the field, growing collaboration and the appearance of conference proceedings on terrorism are indicative of the beginnings of an autonomous academic research field, a distinct discipline of study. In great part, these developments are not only due to the infiltration of new subject areas into the network of terrorism research, but also to the expanding number of journals devoted to different aspects of the subject. The road to recognition as an academic discipline depends on whether the various aspects of terrorism studies can be integrated into one comprehensive branch of learning. This ability, in turn, is conditional on the field's cognitive structure or knowledge characteristics, as well as on the shifts and changes in the actual terrorism scene in the future that might influence the nature of research.

Conservation of Information: Reverse engineering dark social systems

A broad appeal for a new theory of interdependence, 'iota', has been requested for the science of complexity in a special issue of Science, for social network analysis by the National Academy of Sciences, for effects-based operations by the US military, and for modernizing the fields of law and economics. We have proposed a new theory of 'iota' for organizations and systems that already appears to exhibit some validity. It is expressed in a physics of 'iota' (e.g., bistability) that includes Fourier pairs for social uncertainty and Lotka-Volterra-like equations for population effects in social systems. Unlike traditional social science, it assumes that despite the tension between self and collective organizational processes, perfect organizations and social systems become dark, but that purposively dark systems emit more light in the form of unique information (e.g., gangs, terrorists, high-security systems). To reverse engineer dark social systems (DSS), our theory replaces methodological individualism with a physics of social 'iota'. But the many challenges in applying 'iota' to control theory or to metrics for organizational performance make this high-risk research.

Extending Family Nursing: Concepts From Positive Psychology

This article identifies the burgeoning field of positive psychology as an important extension to the knowledge base of family nursing. Representing a new emphasis from the traditional social and human sciences, which have largely focused on problem- and deficit-based approaches, positive psychology focuses on optimal functioning and is an ideal complement to the strengths-based orientation of family nursing. Domains of positive psychology are presented and exemplars of supporting research offered. Finally, suggestions are given for ways to apply concepts from positive psychology to family nursing practice, research, and education.

Fat Bodies, Qualitative Research and the Spirit of Participatory Action Research

Participatory Action Research (PAR) may be conceived of as a politic or an epistemology rather than a rigid methodology. If this is the case, how can PAR inform other qualitative methodologies? How can qualitative researchers adopt the spirit of PAR without doing PAR work itself? In this work, I seek to explore these questions by reviewing how PAR can guide my future dissertation work on the productive effects of the obesity epidemic. I examine how I might base my research in the ethics and politics of social justice and yet also remain open to and accountable for the ways in which my choice of methods reflects what can be seen as the colonizing approach of traditional social science.

Some epistemological implications of economic complexity

I review some epistemological implications of economic complexity, with an emphasis on Turing computability and algorithmic information theory. I examine an argument from F.A. Hayek's theory of complex phenomena in this context and discuss the apparent implication that economic complexity prevents us from eliminating literary methods from economic science. If literary methods are a necessary part of economic science, then the highest level of mathematical rigor may not ensure high quality analysis if the literary methods we use are not equally rigorous. Hayek seems to point to a literary tradition in social science that may have established informative standards of rigor for the literary parts of economic science.

Making Movements Possible: Transportation Workers and Mobility in West Africa

AbstractThis article concerns the social process of mobility control in four West African countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Ghana. Migration has long been an important aspect of West African social, cultural, and political life. This study explores everyday enforcement of international and internal mobility control, and the ways in which Africans respond to and resist the actions of security agents. I accomplish this using ethnographic evidence gathered when travelling over 10,000 miles in Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire over a period of nine months. In addition, data were gathered through participant observation while crossing international borders 23 times in a sub‐region of West Africa, and participating in 169 security control checkpoints in total. This evidence is supplemented by 29 interviews with transportation workers across the four countries studied. Augmenting the traditional social science literature on migrant networks with an approach proposed by development economists, this article shows that transportation workers play an essential role in mobility control in West Africa. The theoretical insights derived here contribute to a larger project of bringing borders and transportation into the same frame of reference as migration in academic study. This project sees movement through interaction, rather than simply through the systems approach so commonly applied in the literature and shows that in the countries under study there exist unstated, implicit social norms among transportation workers, their clients, and security agents, which constitute a key mechanism for migration. These actors operate in a series of structured relationships, which can be described as institutionalised, and which create a series of important exchanges governing movement in the sub‐ region.

Researching Personal Information on the Public Web

There are many personal and social issues that are rarely discussed in public and hence are difficult to study. Recently, however, the huge uptake of blogs, forums, and social network sites has created spaces in which previously private topics are publicly discussed, giving a new opportunity for researchers investigating such topics. This article describes a range of simple techniques to access personal information relevant to social research questions and illustrates them with small case studies. It also discusses ethical considerations, concluding that the default position is almost the reverse of that for traditional social science research: the text authors should not be asked for consent nor informed of the participation of their texts. Normally, however, steps should be taken to ensure that text authors are anonymous in academic publications even when their texts and identities are already public.

<b>Processualidades da Pesquisa Empírica no Portal ClicRBS e as Experiências em Jornalismo 3G</b><br>DOI:10.5007/1984-6924.2010v7n1p99

This article summarizes the empirical approach on 3G Journalism production, the author's object of studies in the Postgraduate Program in Communication Sciences (Unisinos). Thus, the field research was guided to the observation, collection, analysis and interpretation of the production processes of 'video-news' operated in real time (live) with third-generation mobile technology on clicRBS Portal. In combination with complementary methods and techniques of data collection, made to measure and rooted in traditional social sciences, the semi-structured interview is the main tool in obtaining relevant data for this study.

The future of the social sciences and humanities in the science of complex systems

The modern world is characterized by problems that involve systems with social and physical subsystems. They are entangled systems of system of systems with multilevel dynamics. There is no methodology able to combine the partial micro-, meso- and macrotheories that focus on subsystems into a coherent representation of the dynamics of the whole. Policy requires prediction, but the traditional definitions of prediction are not appropriate for multilevel socio-complex systems. Heterogeneous multilevel systems have subsystems that may behave with great regularity over long periods of time, and then suddenly change their behavior due to weak coupling with other subsystems. Thus systems that are usually highly predictable may be subject to rare but extreme events, and this is highly relevant to policy-makers. New ways of thinking are needed that transcend the confines of the traditional humanities, social and physical sciences. Of necessity, this science will be embedded in the design, implementation and management of systems, and therefore the new science will be entwined with policy. Much policy is interventionist experiment. By themselves scientists cannot conduct experiments on socio-complex systems because they have neither the mandate nor the money to design and instrument experiments on the large scale. Policy-makers – elected politicians and their officers – design the future, making it as they believe it ought to be. New kinds of scientific predictions can inform policy but can only be instrumented and tested if there is goodwill between policy-makers and scientists, where scientists are junior partners. Scientists offer policy-makers theories and predictions of social systems based on logical-deductive methods. Policy is generally made on the basis of rhetoric, with the best possible arguments being deployed to support favored conclusions. To convince policy-makers that a particular scientific theory should be used, scientists move from the logical-deductive to the rhetorical. Thus the full theory of a science of complex systems has to provide a logical-deductive metatheory of the rhetorical and logical-deductive systems that make decisions and implement them. Traditional natural and physical science has avoided rhetoric, which is much better understood in the humanities and social sciences. Thus it is concluded that the science of complex systems must embrace the humanities and social sciences not just because their domains of study are relevant but also because their methods are necessary to understand how science and policy work together in complex social systems.

‘HIGH POLITICS’ AND THE ‘NEW POLITICAL HISTORY’

ABSTRACTRecent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.

Making Planning Theory Matter: A Lacanian Encounter with Phronesis

Traditional social science often fails when deployed to explain complex human action. In each specific social field of human endeavour, including planning, experienced actors draw on a range of conscious and unconscious performative knowledges to act with effect: the experts simply ‘know’ what to do. Flyvbjerg suggests that to understand these complex human dispositions framing practice requires a detailed understanding of the particular, not the universal. Drawing on Aristotle's intellectual virtue of phronesis, Flyvbjerg refers to this as a phronetic social science model. This article suggests that Lacan's theoretical insights and conceptualizations pertaining to the split human subject, divided between symbolic consciousness and unconscious affect, can help to empower this phronetic model. The article argues that a Lacanian inspired phronetic model is particularly useful for understanding spatial planning and related urban policy discourses, for it provides insight as to how desire and resultant ideological fantasies shape our shared social reality and spaces of habitation in our globalized world.

When Worlds Collide: Scientists Doing Science in the Social World

AbstractDespite the traditional independence in academia between the science and social science traditions, science is, essentially, a social pursuit, intertwined with social conditions, structures, and processes. If science can be pictured as a form of human cultural activity, practiced by people called ‘scientists,’ then it should be regarded in sociological terms. Given the rapid growth of science in Asia, more sociological studies are thus needed there to unravel the interplay between science and society, and how scientists do science. The present study reports the findings of in-depth open-ended interviews with scientists in various universities and research institutes in Singapore. The overall research question was: How do scientists in Singapore do their work in a social world? The underlying questions were designed to explore the social complexity of scientists’ work. The findings showed that the workings of science were drawn together, and directed by, non-science elements. They included the market, which controls research agendas and fashions; economics, which determines the availability of funding and encourages collaboration; bureaucratic administration, which provides the resources available to do science; and fashions, which persuade researchers to pursue topics considered acceptable by their peers. The associations between science and non-science are also not harmonious. Various tensions were reported in the interviews. What can be done to remedy the colliding worlds of science and non-science? The answer lies in more sociological studies. The sociological study of science is a relatively new item on the academic agenda, and there is a paucity of research in the Asian context. This study identifies several avenues for further enquiry, and serves as a primer for further research.

Situating pedagogy: moving beyond an interactional account

In this paper, I discuss a development within the cultural historical tradition in social science that makes a contribution to our understanding of pedagogy and thus to research in education. This departure involves the incorporation of a sociology of pedagogy into the post-Vygotskian formulation of the social formation of mind. In so doing, it seeks to extend the understanding of pedagogic practice beyond the analysis of dyadic or small group interactions so often found in studies which acknowledge the formative influence of Lev Vygotsky's writing and develops further the analytic and descriptive capacity of the various versions of activity theory developed in the wake of A. N. Leontiev's early work.

Commentary: Moving Beyond Crisis, Crossroads, and the Abyss in the Disciplinary Formation of Planning

The article explicates the contours of an academic discipline and builds an argument in favor of viewing planning as an evolving discipline. As part of our argument, we discuss the unique historical trajectory of the planning discipline, its emphasis on practice and public scholarship, and how this contrasts to the traditional social sciences. We argue that planning scholars need to reorient toward the discipline’s central organizing concept, Friedmann’s knowledge-action framework, and to engage in an ongoing dialectical process of refinement, revision, and extension. To illustrate this point, we provide an example of how recent scholarly work on collective action and social movement contributes to the terrain of planning thought.

Extending the Hegselmann-Krause Model I

Hegselmann and Krause have developed a simple yet powerful computational model for studying the opinion dynamics in societies of epistemically interacting truth-seeking agents. We present various extensions of this model and show their relevance to the investigation of socio-epistemic questions, with an emphasis on normative questions. Agent-based computer simulations have been successfully employed in the study of broadly social processes for over thirty years now. Researchers have investigated by these means such diverse phenomena as the spread of wealth in a population, the emergence and evolution of friendship networks, integration and segregation of different racial groups, the transmission of cultural values, and the propagation of infectious diseases. It is only in the past decade that agent-based simulations have come to be used for studying distinctively socio-epistemic (or socio-doxastic) questions, such as, most notably, questions concerning the roles various types of social interaction play in the acquisition and transmission of beliefs and knowledge. Pioneering work in this area has been carried out by Rainer Hegselmann and Ulrich Krause, who have developed, and systematically investigated, a simple yet already quite powerful model for simulating the opinion dynamics in societies of epistemically interacting truthseeking agents. By thus initiating what they have termed “Computer Aided Social Epistemology,” they have, in our eyes, made an important contribution to social epistemology. After all, social epistemology can be considered to be as much a branch of philosophy as of social science, and one may thus expect that it is able to profit from the deployment of simulation tools no less than the more traditional social sciences have been (and still are). Nevertheless, it has been generally recognized that, in addition to considerable virtues, the Hegselmann–Krause (HK) model also has some important inherent limitations, these being largely due to the fact that the model is starkly idealized in several respects. The present paper proposes various extensions of the model that do away 1See Epstein and Axtell [1996] and the references given there. 2See, e.g., Hegselmann and Krause [2002], [2005], and [2006]; see also Dittmer [2001], Fortunato [2004], and Lorenz [2007]. Similar work is to be found in Deffuant et al. [2000], Weisbuch et al. [2002], and Ramirez-Cano and Pitt [2006].