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
Said - Orientalism‣ Defining culture of U.S.
& Europe
• In opposition
- Others
- The East/The Orient
- Asia
- Arabs
• “Imaginative” geography
• Construction through myth
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
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
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