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social inclusion and justice should be acknowledged to highlight action required to overcome them. First, it urges garden leaders to set out with a non- idealised vision of community; not expecting positive relations as inevitable or easy they can prepare for the skilled work of facilitating communing and negotiating differences. Deliberate effort is required to draw in those who do not see themselves as belonging, and to manage inevitable tensions within communities. Second, for those aspiring to impact urban injustices it prompts realism about what can be achieved
demonstrate a high level of realism.5 In Tim Robinson: Connemara, just as the title suggests, two of the non-acting subjects propel the motivation of the film – both Robinson as writer/cartographer and Connemara as the landscape accompanying the overarching geographical imagination of the film.We might also ask what exactly is the film documenting? How do the subjects contribute to an overall purpose for the documentarian? How do the subjects make their own statements merely by functioning ‘normally’ during the filming? These are all important questions to pursue when
and faculty mentors, I read essential works in critical realism, Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, etc. I took it for granted that theory and philosophy were important and helped me to view and think about the world in new and useful ways, and I fully expected that I would be using social theory in my own inquiries. At the same time, I had some gnawing reservations about the theorists we were reading; to wit, their arguments appeared to me as too detached from the active experience of everyday life and/or they said little beyond the critiques or
of this chapter was to show how thinking from a pragmatist perspective might be useful in understanding work carried out in social science. My exemplar was the human geographer William Bunge and the maps he produced at three different points in his career – that is, insofar as he had a career. Pragmatism cannot be used to determine the validity of Bunge’s claims embedded in his maps. It is not a philosophy like positivism or realism, or even Marxism, which provide criteria to evaluate truth claims. Rather, as Menand (2001 , xi) puts it, pragmatism is “an idea
the needs of the community first. The view of people as ‘objects’ and not participants in social studies was rejected by them. ( Deegan, 1990 , 35–6). 7 In contrast to the contentious relations between the urban sociologists and the Settlement workers, the close relationship between Addams, Dewey and his departmental colleague George Herbert Mead (Dewey’s “closest friend” ( Ryan, 1995 , 79)) nourished the development of a pragmatist approach that transcended the dualisms between knowledge and action, idealism and realism, social theory and social reform
, ‘Ecocriticism urges its practitioners into interdisciplinarity, into science’. See ‘Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience?’, New Literary History 30:3 (1999): 561. 4 Ryden, Mapping, 254–5. On debates within contemporary ecocriticism concerning literary realism and ‘authenticity’, see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995); Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Dana
their claims ( Latour, 1993 ). Pragmatism helps to understand how and why such an arbitrary dualism of constructivism and positivism arises in social praxis and why right-wing populism is the consequence of an over-simplified and deliberately abused constructivism. A pragmatist approach to counter current social tendencies begins with epistemology and extends central insights into the practical procedures of democratic politics. This chapter has explored how pragmatism offers an epistemology in which constructivism and realism do not contradict each other. In
be the prime if not the only problématique of the study’ (1988: 14). On the other hand, however, appreciative critics have, nonetheless, suggested that Strange is ‘prevented from realising the full potential of her radical ontology’ (Tooze, 2000a: 287), that she wastes the opportunity to ‘challenge international relations theory at its very core’ (Palan, 1999: 128) and that she ‘closes the Pandora’s box that she has opened’ (May, 1996: 184). Indeed, there is even the suggestion that she herself invoked multiple forms of ‘realism’ so that her ‘work is torn by
. In this project he collaborated with science fiction writers, who wrote short fictional stories to accompany each piece of the project: Samsung City , Edgelands and The City in the Sea . The pieces also have a soundscape created by electronic musicians, Coldcut, which is intended to reinforce the immersive character of each piece. According to Griffiths ( 2015 ), the panoramic point of view offers a vantage point that ‘give[s] the animations a sense of scope and realism.’ Samsung City is a critique of the influence of corporations on city developments