Joyce & Jung

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Scott R. Harris

Has constructionism become a victim of its own success? Scott Harris argues that, as more scholars adopt the approach, its key concepts are being used in differing and even contradictory ways - thus undercutting the vitality of its application as a research tool. To help clear the waters, he critically examines current debates and delivers a powerful call to launch a renewed constructionism. Harris traces how constructionism has evolved into two distinct perspectives - interpretative and objective - as he delves into timely topics such as social inequality, marital equality, and family diversity. He also evaluates each perspective's strengths, as well as its unique contributions. Sharpened definitions of the goals and vocabulary of both schools of thought, he demonstrates, give us a more lucid understanding of the pressing social issues of our time. Harris clarifies and assesses the power of differing constructionist approaches for understanding a range of critical social issues. -- Publisher description.

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José Medina

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways--from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other's perspectives. Medina's epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism.

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Pushpa Naidu Parekh

Response to Failure provides a significant contribution to the existing body of literary scholarship on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, and Dylan Thomas. The author explored the texture of autobiographical experiences of "failure" that inform the poems and the poets' responses within the intellectual, cultural, religions, and political climates of their times. Unique comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches have been employed, including reader-response interpretation of the poems, as well as gender- and culture-centered theories of literary criticism and culture studies.

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Arnold Rosin

The description of what Jean Piaget discovered with regard to how we as humans might learn, grow and succeed in thinking better as we grow older.