1,720,960 research outputs found
Reframing the Social: A Contribution from the Perspective of Emergentist Systemism
No full textThis dissertation is centered around questions concerning the social (social ontology) and its relationship to social research. One of its major reference points is the philosophical system (characterized as emergentist systemism in this dissertation) developed by the accomplished Argentinian-Canadian physicist and philosopher Mario Bunge.
This dissertation draws extensively on the research findings of natural and social sciences, both in America and Europe, to argue for a systemist (i.e. transcending both macro- and micro-reductionism), realist, and critical approach to social ontology. In particular, Luhmann’s, Bunge’s, and critical social systems theorists’ formulations of social ontology, as well as Luhmann’s premature shift of focus from ontology to epistemology, are discussed and evaluated in depth.
The approach developed in this dissertation is also extended to contribute to the wider debates within sociological theory and analysis, including the project of analytical sociology (as advanced by, among others, Peter Hedström and Jon Elster), critical realism, reductionism, emergence, micro-macro link, social structure and human agency, dialectics of nature, and causality and mechanism-based (microfoundational) explanations in social science
Restoration of Kaohsiung QianJin District's Prosperity: A Proposal Based on Local Observation
No full textThe author moved from Hengchuen, south of the Taiwan, to the prosperous and gorgeous political and economic center of Kaohsiung City when she was a teenager. The Chiengin District used to be the sub-core of Kaohsiung City's politics, finance, and culture. The riverside scenery of the Love River is the memory of many Kaohsiung people; 2021 The fire incident has aroused the citizens of the Chiengin District to pay attention to housing safety, housing justice, urban renewal, and issues, and to think deeply about economic and cultural planning. Facing the loss of population, lack of economic momentum, and continuous decline , the author selects the historical background, current situation and initiatives of the Chiengin District, and interviews government executives, public opinion representatives, and business scholars by means of in-depth investigation. Profound local observations come up with solutions. It is hoped that in the future, through civic participation, community development associations, and the cohesion of public opinion, we will participate in the layout of urban plans, promote urban development, land activation, and jointly promote cultural governance in the Chiengin District. Let Chiengin District connect the technology corridor of North Kaohsiung and Kaohsiung port with "cultural corridor" to gorgeous turn, graceful reproduction
From Design to Social Design: Competitions, Practices and Boundaries of Social Design
No full textThe study focuses on the Social Design category of the Young Pin Design Award. Drawing on discussions in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) regarding network construction and professional boundaries, this paper analyzes the establishment of the Social Design category within the Young Pin Design Award. It explores how this category demarcates itself from general design, examines the process of social design practice within the design field, and investigates how designers connect heterogeneous elements, build design networks, create social design works, and participate in competitions.
Firstly, regarding the boundary-setting in the competition, this study finds that the presented social design in the competition is limited due to its exclusive focus on design students. Thus, the showcased designs only represent a fraction of social design. The criterion for evaluating social design works in the competition vary based on the composition of the judging panel, reflecting different interpretations of social design. Like the indeterminate characteristics of the design field, the standards for social design in the competition are not explicitly defined by the organizers and judges. Instead, these standards are demonstrated through the selected award-winning works, making the competition a platform for judges to vie and showcase their respective definitions of social design.
Secondly, the paper analyzes the networks constructed by social design works in practice. These networks, characterized by three features\ue2design-centricity, departure from conventional design attempts, and active response to the competition\ue2echo the understandings of social design in the context of the Young Pin Design Award and the broader design field. These networks showcase how design objects inherently embody design perspectives, depict the process of educators and students understanding and attempting social design creations, and demonstrate how active responses to the competition can achieve multiple educational, research, and enrollment-related goals.
In conclusion, the understanding and definition of social design within the competition result from negotiations and boundary-setting among diverse actors such as participants, judges, and organizers. The social design competition establishes a buffer between the design and social design domains, employing loose selection rules and judges with varying interpretations of social design to maintain space for innovative social design within the design field. Participants, by understanding award-winning works and translating them into their own submissions, continuously contribute to the demarcation of social design. Within the context of design education, educators and students also generate various types of social design networks through existing resources to respond to the new changes social design brings to the design field, showcasing the diverse possibilities for the practical implementation of social design
Selling Love and Smiles: A Preliminary Study of the Labor Process of "Brothers & Sisters" in Taiwan's Children's Channels
No full textAbstract
Currently, there are two children\ue2s channels in Taiwan that highlight the performance of the \ue2brothers and sisters,\ue2 namely, the children\ue2s channels\ue2 idols/hosts. These channels provide educational programs in teaching children about exercise, daily knowledge, arts and crafts, etc. to assist parents in accompanying and guiding their children. This study attempts to analyze the labor process experienced by these \ue2brothers and sisters,\ue2 who are named after various fruits, animals, desserts, and so on.
This study points out that under the labor regime of the children\ue2s channels, the employer and employee frequently engage in a symbolic struggle and continually redefine the boundaries of professionalism. These workers must engage in various forms of \ue2aesthetic labor\ue2 to fit the role of their characters, while the children\ue2s channels use various strategies such as \ue2infantilization,\ue2 \ue2partial (de-)sexualization\ue2 to domesticate the workers\ue2 bodies and turn them into symbols of the industry.
In addition to selling advertising slots and branded products, the children\ue2s channels also sell immaterial goods such as \ue2emotional labor\ue2 performed by these workers. Thy have to learn delicate \ue2emotional arrangements\ue2 to evoke, maintain, and arrange positive emotions on programs, stages, and social media to meet the needs of all parties.
This study also indicates that dual-earner families are gradually inclined to \ue2outsource\ue2 the intimate, caring, and educational aspects of their children\ue2s life to the children\ue2s channels and especially to these \ue2brothers and sisters.\ue2 When commercial activities enter a household, the intimate relationship between the family members will be altered. Moreover, the involvement of the \ue2brothers and sisters\ue2 in reproducing family relation also redefined their occupational purpose.
The children\ue2s channels not only monitor the labor process of the \ue2brothers and sisters,\ue2 but also interfere with their daily lives. Facing regulation from their employer, these workers can also be flexible in managing their lives, while engaging in overt or covert daily resistance and thus practicing the \ue2art of (not) being dominated.\ue2 By doing so, they manage to be favored by the children\ue2s channels or reduce the risk of punishment. However, the labor process still frequently interferes with their roles and self, leading to mental disorders and repeated breakdowns of their bodies and minds
Politics of Life and Body: Knowledge, Artifacts and Everyday Practices of Fitness in Taiwan
No full text\ue2Fitness\ue2 has increasingly caught the attention of the Taiwanese public in recent years, and there are more and more people devoting time and effort to it. This study traces the development of fitness in Taiwan since the 1950s. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, this study further inquires about the way gym-goers put \ue2fitness\ue2 into practice following the surge in interest in 2008 and how the continuing interest in fitness reflects a change in Taiwanese society\ue2s attitudes towards the ideal body shape and physical fitness.
Building on the definition of \ue2Ethopolitics\ue2 from Contemporary Theory of Bio-politics (Nikolas, 2014), this study proposes the concept of \ue2politics of life and body\ue2 as the main analytical framework. Using this framework, this study focuses on the various workouts and diets that different participants practice in their daily lives and how \ue2body\ue2 and \ue2flesh\ue2 respond to personal beliefs, core values, and the community or society we live in.
This study was mostly conducted with semi\ue2structured interviews, supplemented by participant observation. By interviewing 16 participants about their experiences with fitness, we portray how scientific knowledge and technology products have significant impacts on modern people\ue2s diet and fitness practices in their day-to-day life. The effects of gender, class, and economic capital on people\ue2s decisions and strategies surrounding fitness are also a main concern of this study.
The concept of \ue2Politics of life and body\ue2 in this study describes not only a way of living or a philosophy of life, but a series of daily practices supported by scientific knowledge, technology products, and fitness equipment. It helps people fulfill their everyday training and, even more importantly, shapes their self-discipline in diverse ways. In brief, this study attempts to show that contemporary Taiwanese fitness culture is a discourse which objectifies and standardizes fitness, and it is also a scientized and specialized system that consists of scientific knowledge, technology products, and fitness equipment
Towards a Theory of Counter-Body: Formulating a Strategy of Resistance
No full textCommunity has been conceived by many thinkers as a human body. Since this sort of organicism is based on the knowledge of the human body, the way the human body is conceived has a direct influence on the conceptualization of community. From the perspective of organicism, community is a human body, and the individuals that constitute the community are the organs that constitute the human body. In other words, the organ-ization is the process of cooperation of the organs that regulates the body (politic).
Around the time when sovereign states emerge, the head of the body politic, that is, the sovereign, is underlined by many theorists, most significantly by Bodin and Hobbes. The head serves to institute the law that regulates the whole body, except for the sovereign. This exception is of logical necessity, an inevitable result of the law-instituting force: law becomes effective only when the one who institutes it is not regulated by it. The head, itself an exception, thus becomes a paradoxical organ. On the one hand, it is within the body; on the other hand, it is without the body, and serves as the condition of the body. This thesis considers this body a sovereign body.
While Foucault claims that one should abandon the \ue2Leviathan model\ue2 of community and \ue2cut off the king\ue2s head\ue2 in order to better analyze the mechanisms of biopower, he nevertheless oscillates between the mutually complementary relationship of sovereign power and biopower, and the usurpation of sovereign power by biopower. However, even when biopower has undermined sovereign power, it does so only after the sovereign body is created by the law-instituting force. From this perspective, the sovereign body being biopolitical is anything but a paradoxical constitution.
What, then, offers a possibility of resistance to the biopolitical sovereign body? Many have proposed a-historical approaches, be it transcendental or theological. However, given that the biopolitical sovereign body is a historical construction that carries with it many influences on reality, a-historical approaches, that is, resistance from without, might not be able to construct its conditions of possibility. This essay contends that a historically formulated approach might be more desirable.
Through a reinterpretation of the strategies formulated by L\uc3\uaem T\uc3\uaeng-Lo\ucck (1886-1968) and Tsi\uc3\ubann \uc5\uaai-S\uc3\ubai (1888-1931), this essay provides another way of resisting the biopolitical sovereign body. Both resist from within, that is, with and against the logic of the sovereign body. As opposed to decolonization (creating another sovereign body through law-instituting force), and in distinction to the total submission of the ky\uc5ryokusha, L\uc3\uaem counters colonial repressions through a legally non-legal action that takes place in the \uc3\ua9cart between law and non-law, that is, the space of exception produced by the sovereign body; instead of separating bios from z\uc5\uc4, or reducing life to z\uc5\uc4, Tsi\uc3\ubann argues that z\uc5\uc4 is itself of supreme value. As for Tsi\uc3\ubann, the claim that biopolitics is a reduction of life to z\uc5\uc4 is itself a reduction of z\uc5\uc4. He contends that if the colonial policy is biopolitical, it should be a radical biopolitics, one that incorporates all the biological lives, rather than maintaining a racial rupture within life. Since both of them resist within the sovereign body (the kokutai) through complete assimilation of the logic of the biopolitical sovereign body, their strategy is better characterized as something counter- rather than anti- or de-. This essay is an attempt to contextualize and reinterpret their strategy of resistance as a theory of counter-body (\ue9\ue9\uab\ue8\uab)
University Social Responsibility (USR) Projects in the Making: A Perspective from the Theory of Strategic Action Fields
No full textIn order to comprehend the \ue2University Social Responsibility (USR) Projects\ue2 launched by the Ministry of Education in 2017, this research uses Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam's Strategic Action Field Theory as the main analytical framework to discuss how actors at the university make use of the resources of the University Social Responsibility (USR) Projects to take actions together with residents in the community, and how these actions change the modus operandi of university education and bring impacts on the community.
Through observing and interviewing the school team and community residents of two USR projects, this research compares their respective organizing processes, actions in the field, action plans, and visions of social responsibility. This study finds that the actors involved in the social practices of the university need to communicate closely with the local residents to confirm each other\ue2s willingness to and methods of cooperation in order to stabilize the order of the field the process of cooperation and make possible the diffusion of the field
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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