Social Foundations of Thought and Action

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Raquel Rivas Rojas

Los tres textos que se incluyen en este ensayo son los primeros capítulos de una investigación sobre las políticas de representación elaboradas por distintos sectores culturales, políticos y económicos que circularon en la prensa caraqueña en forma de textos efímeros, entre los años 1925 y 1935. Raquel Rivas Rojas aborda textos en los cuales puede verificarse un momento concreto en el proceso de construcción del imaginario de la nación, y que van desde los cuadros costumbristas del XIX hasta los discursos de la semana del estudiante de 1928. Estos textos se estudian buscando un acercamiento, no a los hechos empíricos, sino a los modos de representación a partir de los cuales fueron construidos.

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Fatima Naqvi

This study analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. In a radically fragmented public sphere, individuals perceive themselves as dissociated from all others, while at the same time they feel similar to everyone else. Where genuine solidarity and communality is attenuated, people present themselves as victims to garner media attention, create fragile social bonds, or escape supposed marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that contemporary discourse continues a trajectory mapped in the early 20th century?in the shadow of Nazism. In a series of paradigmatic readings of Reň Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayṟcker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she traces the on-going fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in the West. She looks at the way in which such cultural anxiety expresses itself; at how victim rhetoric calls itself into question; and, finally, at how it perpetuates itself in the moment that it becomes philosophically ungrounded.

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Derek Hook, Bradley Franks, Martin Bauer

"This is the first comprehensive text on social psychological approaches to communication, providing an excellent introduction to theoretical perspectives, special topics, and applied areas and practice in communication. Bringing together scholars of international reputation, this book provides a unique contribution to the field"--

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Patricia J. Williams

In these pages we encounter figures and images plucked from headlines -from Tonya Harding to Lani Guinier, Rush Limbaugh to Hillary Clinton, Clarence Thomas to Dan Quayle - and see how their portrayal, encoding certain stereotypes, often reveals more about us than about them. What are we really talking about when we talk about welfare mothers, for instance? Why is calling someone a "redneck" okay, and what does that say about our society? When young women appear on Phil Donahue to represent themselves as Jewish American Princesses, what else are they doing? These are among the questions Williams considers as she uncovers the shifting, often covert rules of conversation that determine who "we" are as a nation.