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negotiated in practices therefore allows us to link micro and macro processes associated with peacekeeping. While practices have long been a staple concept of social constructivism, it has arguably been only with the introduction of practice theories that IR theory has been able to capture the full analytical promise of this important concept. Further, I argued that the growing recognition of practice theories’ diverse location in social theory and sociology gives them deep analytical purchase, helping us access reasons for both situations of change and of persistent
the means’. Realism is usually seen as conservative because of its emphasis on the state and military power and its disdain for or scepticism of ‘progressive’ change. However, as I discuss below, there is a left realist tradition and this can be combined with constructivism. Conservative realists are elitists who favour only a very limited form of democracy and argue that the public should not influence policy because they lack the competence to come to an informed opinion. The elite supporters of the peace process in Northern Ireland have thus justified their
best method for harmonizing conflicting interests. Constructivism is another similarity between a Foucauldian and a contract approach. Constructivism sees ethical values as the outcome of the decision process. 18 It includes a sense of normative discourse as constructed in history and operating under certain specified conditions, from which can be derived justifiable principles of practice. Scanlon argues that: a constructivist account of the normative domain is appealing because it seems to offer a way of explaining how normative judgments can have
’ exhibiting minimal democratic features alongside some distinctly authoritarian characteristics. And it is not just weak states which exhibit this semi-democratic character – Russia, Belarus and, outside of the former communist region, Turkey also arguably fall into this category. 29 Social constructivism Social constructivism, according to Alexander Wendt, is ‘analytically neutral
of IR theorising and case study work around dealing with traumatic or divided pasts and reconciliation after protracted and violent conflicts is, I argue, essential 220 THEORIES OF IR AND NORTHERN IRELAND to understanding these potentialities and is an aspect of policy learning that seems to be somewhat under-appreciated in contemporary debates over policy design in Northern Ireland. Memory, IR theory, and reconciliation Recent literature in the field of memory studies has increasingly looked to constructivism and international norms in analysing the resilience
influence customer behaviour.11 Many of the leading marketers in Sweden were educated in, and drew inspiration from, the United States, where new ideas about commercial production, business, marketing and consumer behaviour were evolving in the early twentieth century. As modern ideas on marketing spread there was simultaneously a paradigm shift in display aesthetics. The aesthetic impulses came from constructivism via the influential Bauhaus school in Modernism in the streets Germany and were also strongly coloured by functionalism. Consequently, Swedish window
3 Kino in America: Soviet montage and the American cinematic avant-garde Alongside the radical Constructivism of the New Playwrights Theatre, the American avant-garde’s most sympathetic engagement with Soviet revolutionary culture was in cinema. If the innovations of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Constructivist theatre stimulated the NPT, then the development of cinematic montage by his protégé Sergei Eisenstein, alongside Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko, had an analogous impact upon American avant-garde cinema. The Soviet film
beyond the optical. Soviet design of the 168 Modernism and the making of the Soviet New Man 6.8 Inspection of metro cars, in How We Built the Metro. future would enter the realm of the supra-visual; articulating new forms of social life, it would articulate a new sensuality, engaging the haptic, visual-tactile sensorium. This, at least, was the vision of one of the pioneers of Soviet constructivism, Moisei Ginzburg, as elaborated in his treatise of 1934, Housing. Ginzburg criticized Western modernism because rather than doing away with ornament, it had merely
This book highlights sport as a key inspiration for an international range of modernist artists. With sport attracting large crowds, being written about in the press, filmed and broadcast, and with its top stars enjoying celebrity status, sport has claims to be the most pervasive cultural form of the early twentieth century.
Modernist artists recognised sport’s importance in their writings and production. This book examines a diverse set of paintings, photographic works, films, buildings, and writings from artists in France, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union to establish the international appeal of the theme while acknowledging local and stylistic differences in its interpretation. From the fascination with the racing cyclist in paintings by Umberto Boccioni, Lyonel Feininger and Jean Metzinger, to the designs for stadiums in fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, the works examined are compelling both in visual and ideological terms.
Encompassing studies of many avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier’s architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus, this book interrogates the ways in which sport and modernism interconnect.
This is the first monograph devoted to the work of one of the foremost contemporary advocates of critical theory, Andrew Feenberg. It focuses on Feenberg’s central concept, technical politics, and explores his suggestion that democratising technology design is key to a strategic understanding of the process of civilisational change. In this way, it presents Feenberg’s intervention as the necessary bridge between various species of critical constructivism and wider visions of the kind of change that are urgently needed to move human society onto a more sustainable footing. The book describes the development of Feenberg’s thought out of the tradition of Marx and Marcuse, and presents critical analyses of his main ideas: the theory of formal bias, technology’s ambivalence, progressive rationalisation, and the theory of primary and secondary instrumentalisation. Technical politics identifies a limitation of Feenberg’s work associated with his attachment to critique, as the opposite pole to a negative kind of rationality (instrumentalism). It concludes by offering a utopian corrective to the theory that can provide a fuller account of the process of willed technological transformation and of the author’s own idea of a technologically authorised socialism.