Methodological Investigations in Agent-Based Modelling : With Applications for the Social Sciences
Examines the methodological complications of using complexity science concepts within the social science domain. The opening chapters take the reader on a tour through the development of simulation methodologies in the fields of artificial life and population biology, then demonstrates the growing popularity and relevance of these methods in the social sciences. Following an in-depth analysis of the potential impact of these methods on social science and social theory, the text provides substantive examples of the application of agent-based models in the field of demography. This work offers a unique combination of applied simulation work and substantive, in-depth philosophical analysis, and as such has potential appeal for specialist social scientists, complex systems scientists, and philosophers of science interested in the methodology of simulation and the practice of interdisciplinary computing research.
Governing knowledge : A study of continuity and change in higher education : A Festschrift in Honour of Maurice Kogan
In this book, an international group of leading higher education researchers draw on a wealth of social theory and comparative, empirical research to analyse current developments and their implications. Different contributions focus on different levels of higher education, the system, the institution and the academic practitioner, in different national and international contexts. However, strong common themes bind these contributions together. They include not only the significance of massification, globalisation, neo-liberalism and managerialism for the governance of higher education, its knowledge and values, but also the complexities of change processes, the importance of context and history and the strength of the stabilities that remain.
Forensic Genetics in the Governance of Crime
This book uses a critical sociological perspective to explore contemporary ways of reformulating the governance of crime through genetics. Through the lens of scientific knowledge and genetic technology, Machado and Granja offer a unique perspective on current trends in crime governance. They explore the place and role of genetics in criminal justice systems, and show how classical and contemporary social theory can help address challenges posed by social processes and interactions generated by the uses, meanings, and expectations attributed to genetics in the governance of crime
Food Anxiety in Globalising Vietnam
This book approaches the anxieties inherent in food consumption and production in Vietnam. The country’s rapid and recent economic integration into global agro-food systems and consumer markets spurred a new quality of food safety concerns, health issues and distrust in food distribution networks that have become increasingly obscured. This edited volume further puts the eating body centre stage by following how gendered body norms, food taboos, power structures and social differentiation shape people’s ambivalent relations with food. It uncovers Vietnam’s trajectories of agricultural modernisation against which consumers and producers manoeuvre amongst food self-sufficiency, security and abundance. It provides social science perspectives on anxieties related to food and surrounding discourses that travel between the local and the global, the individual and society and into the body. Therefore, the book’s lens of food anxiety matters for social theory and for understanding the embeddedness and discontinuities of food globalizations in Vietnam and beyond.
Explorations of the Life-World : Continuing Dialogues with Alfred Schutz
This anthology originated from three conferences, which were held at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, on March 26-28, 1999, at the Univ- sity of Konstanz, Germany, on May 26-29, 1999 and a session at the SPHS annual meeting at the University of Oregon, USA, on October 5-7, 1999. With one exception the contributions to this volume are revised versions of papers read at these meetings. Each of these conferences took place in order to celebrate the centennial of the birthday of Alfred Schutz, who was born April 13, 1899, and died May 20, 1959. First of all we would like to thank Evelyn Schutz-Lang, the daughter of Alfred and Ilse Schutz, for her continuing support and encouragement.
Material Agency : Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, and economics. The editors and authors demostrate that a distributed, relational approach to agency, incorporating both humans and artifacts, has important ramifications for how we understand material culture.
Lifelong Learning - Signs, Discourses, Practices
This text explores the different ways in which the various social practices in which people participate becomes signed as learning, how and why that occurs and with what consequences. It takes seriously the linguistic turn in social theory to draw upon semiotics and poststructuralism through which to explore the significance of lifelong learning as an emerging discourse in education. The text explores the different ways in which learning conveys meaning and is given meaning. Given this, lifelong learning therefore is a way, and a significant way, in which learning is fashioned. The text then explores the notion that, if learning is lifelong and lifewide, what precisely is learning as distinct from other social practices and how those practices are given meaning as learning.
Knowledge and Action
Explores interdependencies between knowledge, action, and space from different interdisciplinary perspectives. Some of the contributors discuss knowledge as a social construct based on collective action, while others look at knowledge as an individual capacity for action. The chapters contain theoretical frameworks as well as experimental outcomes.
Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik : Non-affirmative Theory of Education
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This volume argues for the need of a common ground that bridges leadership studies, curriculum theory, and Didaktik. It proposes a non-affirmative education theory and its core concepts along with discursive institutionalism as an analytical tool to bridge these fields. It concludes with implications of its coherent theoretical framing for future empirical research.
An Archaeology of Colonial Identity : Power and Material Culture in the Dwars Valley, South Africa
This book is the based on the work of many people, and while I discuss many of them in the general context of this book in Chapter 1. The backbone of the book is based on a project, 'Farm Lives' conducted between 1999 and 2002, funded exclusively by the McDonald Institute for Archaeolog-ical Research at the University of Cambridge.
After Bourdieu : Influence, Critique, Elaboration
Intellectual origins & orientations We begin by providing an overview of Bourdieu’s life as a scholar and a public intellectual. The numerous obituaries and memorial tributes that have appeared following Bourdieu’s untimely death have revealed something of his life and career, but few have stressed the intersection of his social origins, career trajectory, and public intellectual life with the changing political and social context of France. This is precisely what David Swartz’s “In memoriam” attempts to accomplish. In it he emphasizes the coincidence of Bourdieu’s young and later adulthood with the period of decolonization, the May 1968 French university crisis, the opening up of France to privatization of many domains previously entrusted to the state (l’état providence), and, most threatening to post-World War II reforms, the emergence of globalization as the hegemonic structure of the 21st century.










