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American philosophical realism developed in two forms: "new" and "critical" realism. While the new realists sought to 'emancipate' ontology from epistemology and defended a direct theory of perception, the critical realists promoted a representationalist account of perception and thus argued for an epistemological dualism. Bertrand Russell's early philosophical writings figured prominently in both of these American realist camps. However, while the new realists quite enthusiastically embraced the Russellian analytic style of reasoning (and Russell himself appreciated the American new realists as anti-idealist allies), the critical realists were significantly more reserved toward Russell's point of view. In the present paper, I identify the reasons for this difference in reception. In particular, I will show that the critical realists' reservations pertained primarily to a more traditionalist—'continental'—account of philosophy, whereas the neo-realists proved instrumental in setting the stage for later full-blown analytic philosophy in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-Gramscians have drawn on the concept of interregnum and connected terms to shed light on the 'global organic crisis' they claim we have been living through since 2008. I examine their ideas, highlighting the important contributions they have made in this terrain. In doing so, however, certain oversights are detected in the neo-Gramscian theoretical framework, leaving them unable to explain fully the dynamics of the contemporary international system or, more pointedly, structural change itself. Ultimately this stems from ontological shallowness: a tendency to reduce reality to intersubjectivity and conscious class agency. Rooted in critical realism, and drawing on Gramsci and Gramsci-inspired scholars such as world-systems analyst Giovanni Arrighi, this article aims to offer a more convincing account of the present conjuncture. In contrast to the neo-Gramscian transnational perspective, I recognize the continuing relevance of 'world hegemony', arguing that the global organic crisis is actually an expression of a systemic crisis afflicting American world hegemony and the neoliberal accumulation regime it helps underwrite. Hegemony has never been solely based on consensus—coercion and militarism are integral to it. Nonetheless, this article questions the sustainability of a world hegemon (the United States) increasingly reliant on political and military means to overcome 'incurable structural conditions' in a changing global scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typical pedagogical practices center Whiteness, particularly when teaching about racism and racial justice. This article offers a framework that de-centers the White frame using: coloniality of power, critical realism, critical consciousness. The coloniality of power analyzes the order of social relations and embedded hegemonic structures in the US. Critical realism posits a multi-layered construct of reality encompassing subjugated experiences, illustrating how dominant groups can share these experiences. Critical consciousness explains the need for all individuals to identify mechanisms of oppression that maintain, perpetuate, and sustain the exclusion and subjugation of BIPOC. Together, these three concepts create a foundation highlighting accountability and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Proposed more than two decades ago, culturally relevant/responsive teaching or pedagogy (CRP) is one promising approach to transforming the education experience of historically marginalized groups. The development of CRP has since inspired changes in teacher education programs and resulted in considerable research on preparing teachers for CRP. However, critics have argued that much work on CRP has not fulfilled its transformative potential of addressing racism and the white-supremacist foundations underlying teacher education research and practice and have urged CRP research to grow from the existing knowledge base and to innovate. Purpose of Study: This study critically examines the research practices of empirical studies on preparing K-12 preservice teachers for CRP in the United States by merging ideas of research as social practice with critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and Indigenous epistemologies to argue for research as racialized social practice. The goal is to provide perspectives and lines of research that are true to the radical shifts the original theories called for, yet might not have been fully fulfilled. Research Design: This critical literature review applies the research-as-racialized-social-practice lens to examine how CRP research studies frame problems and research questions, elaborate theoretical frameworks and research methodology, and discuss findings and implications. Our analysis positions CRP research on the research-as-racialized-social-practice continuum, ranging from maintaining the racist status quo to intentionally disrupting it. Findings: Our analysis reveals that dominant research practices—emphasizing the problem of individual deficiencies rather than inequitable systems, employing a research logic focusing on linearity rather than complexity, and lacking in-depth examination of racialized and cultural ways of knowing for both researchers and participants—maintain the inequitable status quo rather than disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions and practices. While we recognize the important work and useful knowledge accumulated by this body of literature over two decades, we urge teacher educators and researchers to stay vigilant and resist research epistemologies and practices that recenter, recycle, and maintain whiteness, perpetuating the racist status quo. Conclusions: We recommend that teacher education researchers can construct research questions capable of generating new knowledge to disrupt racial injustice; utilize and further develop critical theoretical frameworks that sufficiently attend to various aspects of race and racism in teaching, learning, and society, and are meaningfully linked to disruptive research methodologies; and, finally, attend clearly to the ability of research to disrupt the racist status quo within their findings and implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between American pragmatism and American critical realism needs to be reconsidered. The two currents shared many aspects, but there were also significant differences. One of these differences pertains to the object of perception or, more precisely, to the question of what we talk about when we talk about this, for example, being blue. By re-addressing that question, some light can be shed on the historical development of analytic philosophy in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. My case in point is the respective positions of C. I. Lewis and R. W. Sellars. I shall point out that Sellars's view has more to recommend it because it provides a more compelling framework for a comprehensive explanation of perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), constructed 2016-2017, is just one of numerous energy pipelines in the United States. As with many pipelines, environmental impact is a potential and a concern, but opposition to the DAPL became more intense than opposition to other pipelines, even reaching the national and international stages. Though competing narratives and the depiction of some actors in the DAPL debate have been elucidated and analyzed, there are still ways to apply theory to explain why the DAPL in particular became such a hot political issue or if this issue did any more than capture the public's attention for a fleeting moment. Assemblage theory should be able to provide an explanation, but it has different genealogies, some diametrically opposed to one another, and they have not been rigorously applied to real-world situations. By carefully applying assemblage theory to the controversy surrounding the DAPL, this article seeks to simultaneously explain the controversy surrounding the DAPL and refine some of the nuanced concepts comprising assemblage theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lack of clarity about underlying philosophical commitments leads to lack of clarity at other levels of analysis. Here I show that the literature on so-called 'causal mechanisms' is rife with conceptual problems, stemming from insufficient rigor with respect to the metaphysics of causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A human rights perspective must be embedded in the institutions, organisations or agencies where social work students find themselves. This paper will focus on one particular strategy that could be helpful to the process of solidifying a commitment to human rights for our students. Using a pedagogical tool from a school of social work in the USA originally developed to combat the social injustice of racism, the example transcends the academic institution and offers a solid link in connecting human rights, social justice and social work. Using the construct of critical realism, we argue that, for social work programmes to take steps towards an explicit commitment to human rights, not only must human rights be infused throughout the curriculum, but educators must provide opportunities for making more overt the links between human rights principles, social justice and social work. By addressing behaviours, tendencies and attitudes, students then acquire not only the skills and deeper understanding, but they internalise the motivation and commitment to broaden their human rights frame. In the process of developing a more firm commitment to human rights, we must not be limited to the walls of the academy, but rather extend beyond to our field agencies, organisations and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn of the last century saw an explosion of philosophical realisms, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Gary Hatfield helpfully asks whether we can impose order on this chaotic scene by portraying these diverse actors as responding to a common philosophical problem--the so-called problem of the external world, as articulated by William Hamilton. I argue that we should not place the American realism that grows out of James's neutral monism in this problem space. James first articulated his position in response to critical attacks on the methodology he had employed in his psychological research. The direct topic of these criticisms was James's earlier claim that a scientific psychology must treat knowledge as an inexplicable theoretical primitive. If I am right, then we ought to hesitate about Hatfield's suggestion that American realism operated inside the same problem space as the early realism of British figures like Russell and Moore. James's neutral monismfirst emerged as a conception of knowledge by a psychologist, and it was designed to meet concerns about his scientific research that had been raised by other psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Celebrations of transformation abound' in public administration (Nickel 2009, p. 383), heralding the emergence of a post-traditional discipline according analytical and normative priority to networks. This paper develops a critique of post-traditional public administration, arguing that it overlooks the continuance of 'traditional' practices, such as the tendency for governing networks to resolve into hierarchies and historical continuities between governing forms. The paper advances a Gramscian critique of the celebration of governance networks, understood as a moment in the struggle for hegemony. Drawing on the author's study of strategic partnerships in the UK, it argues that tacit citizen resistance to managerialism maybe one explanation for why governing networks are prone to resolving into hierarchies. Interpreted through the lens of the 'integral state', the incremental retreat from the politics of hegemony towards bureaucratic domination occurs, at least partly, because 'active citizens' are unwilling or unable to learn and play by the rules of the game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Charles Tilly's relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a 'historicist.' The 'search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,' he argued, was a 'waste of time' and had 'utterly failed.' Tilly's approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on 'historical individuals' rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly's program of 'relational realism' resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism's argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly's ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show how the medical specialism of resuscitation deals with two substantial difficulties, and how this is achieved rhetorically. The first problem that resuscitation medicine faces is that it is unable, for a variety of reasons, to live up to its own ideals of being scientific and evidence-based. The second problem is that, despite 45 years of technological innovation, the specialism has made Little progress in its main aim of saving lives. A range of texts from within resuscitation medicine will be analysed to show the discursive techniques employed by this community to rhetorically overcome these problems, and re-assert the authority of medicine within this sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the treatment of critical realism studies in different countries. The author examines the work of philosophers from countries like France, Germany, and the United States, suggesting that one of the largest factors in determining a philosopher's thinking is the area in which they live.

This article develops a critical realist, strategic-relational analysis of the gendering of the state. It draws freely from feminist theorists, recent work on masculinity, and some of the insights of 'queer theory'. 1 My aim is to show the contingently necessary nature of the gender biases in the state's institutional architecture and operation and show how these can be illuminated through a critical realist, strategic-relational perspective. The article has four main parts. These deal with (a) critical realism and the strategic-relational approach (hereafter SRA); (b) its implications for analyzing gender selectivities; (c) the gender selectivities of advanced capitalist democratic states; and (d) some implications of strategic selectivity for feminist action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the debate surrounding genetically modified (GM) food, intense controversies pertain over whether, or how, GM food products ought to be labelled. This paper examines how the GM-supportive and GM-sceptical alliances use arguments regarding labelling so as to strengthen their respective positions. It is an examination of conflicting arguments across social coalitions, corporations and policy-makers, mainly in the USA, but with certain European comparisons. The empirical material consists of written statements by the different groups. The paper suggests that the ideological and epistemological tenets are radically transformed, or even 'crossed over', between GM proponents and opponents when the focus is moved from GM per se to labelling. Two types of crossovers are identified: (i) the crossover of ideologies, and (ii) the crossover of epistemologies. The paper concludes that, while implementing mandatory GM labelling may have several democratic advantages, it is more urgent that both alliances become more reflexive and communicative concerning inconsistent or eclectic crossovers — both ideological and epistemological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the critical realism reflected in the short stories written by novelist Mary Hartwell Catherwood in the U.S. Descriptions about the towns and rural communities; Impact of the life experiences of Catherwood on her realistic capabilities; Narrative style of the stories of the novelist.