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on a rational calculation of costs and benefits. These realist assumptions in IR have been challenged by the school of constructivism. While constructivism does not deny that self-interest can or does impel a nation’s foreign policy and international interactions, it is critical of realism for not focusing sufficiently on how the interests of a nation or state are constructed; for example the importance of context, international norms and a state’s identity in influencing state behaviour. In this way, the constructivist critique of realism in IR can be seen as
identified positive political potential in a new generation of young technologists, who he thought might be inclined to design technics for a better civilisation ( 1964 : 227–229). This idea is an important launching-off point for Feenberg’s theory. To develop this notion further, Feenberg engages with a third branch of scholarship, namely the constructivism associated with science and technology studies (STS), which came to prominence in the academy in the 1980s. Work in this school focused on the underdetermined character of technological artefacts, especially in their
of futurismo 127 (Kommunisty-Futuristy). Their programme, which rejected bourgeois values in favour of a new Communist art, was penned by Kushner and published in the magazine Iskusstvo Kommuny (The art of the commune). Its representatives, which also included Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Bogdanov, supported Taylorism and standardisation, leading to constructivism in the 1920s. Proletkult was a shorthand term for ‘proletarskaya kultura’ (proletarian culture). It was a composite, federal arts institution and movement founded on the Marxist premise of the
pregiven. Rationalist theories, such as realism, argue that states are ‘like units’ and behave according to their capabilities and interests. For liberals, it is a Making and disrupting identity5 mosaic of individual and group interests that are contained within the ‘state’ (Guillaume 2010, 13). Yet, individual and collective identities cannot form without exposure to and engagement with the outside world and others; it is through interaction that identity forms, and the relationship is co-constitutive, a point taken up by social constructivism in international
liberalism and certain circles within unofficial Soviet art, Stalinism was an expression of “holism” or “aestheticism,” a temptation to overcome the autonomy of art and treat life itself as artistic material, invoking the same principles of methodological totality. Such views, already popular in Moscow artistic circles after the death of Stalin, were then inherited by intellectuals and artists in the last decades of the USSR. It became common to marshal the various wings of the art of the Soviet left (constructivism, productivism) to explain the excesses and brutalities of
Feenberg draws on the insights of social constructivism to argue that the design of technologies is a contentious, disputed and thoroughly political process. Technologies come heavily inscribed with symbolic meanings, including, in capitalist society, the message that they are authoritative and determinate. One of Feenberg’s innovations has been to show how these social inscriptions not only construct technology in line with the conceptions of specific social groups but, at the same time, tie artefacts into wider social networks ( 2010 : 76). Enlarging the
neutrality This book proposes to rethink the mainstream conceptualisation of neutrality through a social constructivist methodology. Briefly, constructivism is concerned with the impact of ideas as well as material factors, and focuses on how the interests and identities of actors are flexible, or a result of certain historical processes. By focusing on what constitutes identity
theoretical groundwork for the identification of symbiosis between the conceptualisation of the nation-state and the European Union in official Irish discourse that constitutes the focus of this book. An emphasis on context, the governmental elite and the role of discourse places this research in a broadly constructivist framework. In the realm of social science, ‘constructivism’ holds (following Berger and Luckmann [1967] and Searle [1995]) that social realities exist only by human cognitive action and agreement. Hence they are fragile and changeable – shaped, among other
different emotional states interpenetrate each other across a number of levels and boundaries (individual/collective-psychological/sociological/biological).17 Difficult, particularly when considering the more recent work which draws on social constructivism, does not necessarily mean impossible. However, the reason for flagging up this difficulty in constructivist work is because other interpretive approaches, especially those associated with hermeneutics and aesthetics, are more attuned or better suited to interpret how emotions are captured and articulated through
appears to be an ideal case for showing the potential and limits of social constructivism. The claim here is not that social constructivism, at all times and in all cases, is the ‘better’ option and thus by necessity more powerful than its competitors in offering an understanding of EU foreign policy, but rather that it seems worthwhile to investigate the scope of its potential in the selected case. It should be emphasised that