STR: Essay 4 - Shifting the Paradigm

What’s a paradigm?

‣ “a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field”

‣ Paradigms embody/encompass theory

‣ Social theory as a vast uneven intellectual landscape

Cool new questions raised…

‣ How is knowledge produced?

‣ Who has the power to create knowledge?

‣ Who has access to knowledge?

‣ What would knowledge look like if everyone participated in its production?

Old issues readdressed…‣ Ontological understanding

• What is the social world?

‣ Epistemology

• How we know about social reality

‣ Exclusion of

• Perspectives & Ideas

• Legitimacy of

- Times, Places, Standpoints

‣ Sensitivity to marginalized people (social groups)

W.E.B Du Bois‣ Should there be only

one paradigm?

‣ Challenged the role of the investigator

• Objective outsider

• Participant

‣ Conflict between

• Concepts, theories, and abstractions

• Lived experience

American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born: February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, MADied: August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana

Founded: NAACP, Niagara Movement

His Theory‣ Contradictions of

modernity

• Freedom & segregation

‣ The veil between

• Societal conflict

• Interpersonal experience

‣ “double-consciousness”

• Each individual may see the world through multiple lens

His experience & research

‣ Oppression

‣ Subjugation

‣ Exclusion

‣ History

‣ Sociology

‣ Literature

‣ Black spirituals

Understanding Racism

‣ Social structures of racism

• Housing

• Education

• Labor

‣ Dimensions of racism

• Intersubjective

- Stereotypes

- Assumptions

• Psychological

Simone De Beauvoir

‣ Phenomenology

• The nature of being

• Science of phenomena

• Explanation of

- Lived experience

- Meaning

Feminist perspective

‣ How is meaning given to concepts like “gender”?

‣ How does attribution of meaning lead to oppression?

‣ Dialectical relationship

• Women

• Men

Attributing meaning to

‣ “Women” receives meaning only through relationship to “man”

• Derived

• Incomplete

• Inferior

‣ Subject & object

Attributing meaning to

‣ “Man” assigned meaning as

• Original

• Whole

• Superior

Said - Orientalism‣ Defining culture of U.S.

& Europe

• In opposition

- Others

- The East/The Orient

- Asia

- Arabs

• “Imaginative” geography

• Construction through myth

Myth of the East

‣ Less advanced

‣ Inferior

‣ Distant

‣ Exotic

Production of identity

‣ Images

‣ Texts

‣ Stereotypes

‣ Language

Dorothy Smith –The Conceptual Practices of Power‣ Standpoint Theory

• Ones “standpoint”

• Creates knowledge/perceptions

‣ The standpoint

• Location in social space

• Power

• Status

• etc.

Canadian sociologist -Sociology, women's studies, psychology, and educational studiesBorn: July 6, 1926 (age 89), England, United KingdomEducation: London School of Economics and Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

Interrogation of “Standpoints”

‣ Durkheim

‣ Marx

‣ Weber

‣ Etc.

‣ e.g., Focus of male sociologists

• Politics

• Law

• Economy

Objectivity

‣ “no such thing"

‣ All views are “located”

‣ All views are biased

‣ Standpoints

• Generate experience

• Lived experience generates the social world

Omg & Winant –Racial Formation in the US

‣ Origins of meaning of racial categories

• Large-scale institutions

• Political

• Media

• Education

• Law

Omg & Winant - Racial Formation in the US

‣ Ongoing processes

• Contesting

• Negotiating

• Transforming

‣ Racial formation

• Fluid

- Dynamic

- Interactive

• Collective

• Individual

Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks‣ Role of language

• Personal identity

• Personal understanding

‣ Effect of colonialism on people

• Inhabits perception of own completeness

• Questions one’s state of being (humaness)

‣ Speaking the language of the colonizer

Postcolonial theory

‣ Tied to decolonization

• Africa

• Caribbean

‣ Decolonization revealed long-lasting effects

• Psychological

• Cultural

Hill-Collins - Black Feminist Thought‣ Black Feminist

Epistemology

• Lived experience of oppression

• Shared narratives of experience

‣ Rejection of simple binaries

• West vs. east

• Female vs. male

• Objective vs. subjective

Viewpoints

‣ Multiple

• Gender

• Race

• Class

• etc.

‣ Interactions

‣ Overlapping

Forces a rethinking of objectivity‣ Value of alternative epistemologies

‣ Valuable sources of knowledge

‣ Can all things be known from a single dominant way of knowing?

‣ Mixing viewpoints

• Generates epistemologies

• Always political

• Sites of resistance

- Oppression & inequality

Deconstruction

‣ What viewpoints?

‣ What epistemologies?

‣ What assumptions?

Objective

‣ Construction of new social theory

‣ More

• Accurate

• Inventive

• Ethical

Components of a alternative theories

‣ Lived experience & social structures

‣ Multiple views

• Standpoints, etc.

‣ Awareness of power

• Marginalization

• Exclusion