Against Stultifying Classifications, for a ‘New Humanism’: Frantz Fanon’s Contribution to Social Work’s Commitment to ‘Liberation’

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Garrett
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Professional Role ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
New Humanism ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Recent Collection ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

Abstract Efforts to ‘decolonize’ social work, along with the contemporary resurgence of racism and fascism, might prompt a return to the work of Frantz Fanon. Mostly focusing on Black Skin, White Masks and a recent collection, Alienation and Freedom, it is argued that Fanon’s commitment to liberation and the creation of a ‘new humanism’ was reflected in both his anti-colonial politics and in his practice as a psychiatrist. A defining characteristic of Fanon’s professional role is that he tried to imbue it with same values and progressive aspirations central to his political project. It is maintained that Fanon’s aspiration to dismantle obstacles to democracy is reflected in his aspiration to confront oppressive categories pertaining to ‘race’ and also those rooted in the ‘common sense’ of the Psychiatric Hospital. In both contexts, his political and professional contributions convey significant messages for social work and chime with the ethical commitments of the profession to promote the ‘liberation of people’.

scholarly journals Human Prospective of Higher Education

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Nifle
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Knowledge Society ◽  
Rear View Mirror ◽  
Virtual Realities ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

The “knowledge society” is an effect of “foresight to the rear view mirror”. The mutation should initially be understood as the passage of a logic of “adaptive conformation”, with a logic “of responsible autonomisation”. It will be henceforth stake and method. The integration of the three shutters axiologic, epistemological and praxeologic around the “common sense” and of empowerment or responsible autonomisation is an answer to the questions of the congress. For that it is necessary to exceed “the rational intelligence”, to reach the “ symbolic intelligence” or intelligence of Sense. The mutation is an entry in an age of Sense, that of the communities of Sense and projects, that of worlds and virtual realities. Three radical axes of change: - the responsible autonomisation like finality, capacity and method of teaching - the creation of virtual places of teaching and of formation with the macropedagogic cities. - a transdisciplinarity based on `symbolic intelligence” or intelligence of Sense.

scholarly journals Creating common sense: getting NATO to Afghanistan

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Münch
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Practice Theory ◽  
Member States ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

AbstractThis article raises the question of how NATO became bogged down in Afghanistan. I scrutinise how the alliance became involved in Afghanistan and how it formulated its strategy. In doing this, I follow the general premises of practice theory. However, instead of the common focus on diplomats and their everyday doings, this article suggests an approach that pays more attention to the structure of the field of positions. I demonstrate that the actions of permanently seconded representatives of member states and of NATO’s administrative cadre were crucial in drawing the alliance into Afghanistan. I argue that their actions significantly contributed to the creation of a fatal common sense: namely that the alliance had to become and remain engaged even in the absence of clear political goals. This provided the basis for a means-focused and endless mission.

scholarly journals On Frantz Fanon: Key Concepts

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Farhan
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Global South ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Common Parlance ◽  
The Common

Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, theorist, philosopher, playwright, and a leading political actor and figure in the struggle for decolonization. Between the publication of his two best-known works, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs), in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre) in 1961, Fanon defended his medical thesis in Paris, was a resident psychiatrist at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, and published several more books and numerous clinical and critical articles advancing counter-narratives on colonialism and colonial psychiatry in various medical and radical journals. In the following decades, his work would become canonical in postcolonial studies, and has shaped the common parlance of scholarship on the Global South. This vignette showcases Fanon’s contribution through an examination of his most prevalent scholarship and theories, and a brief summary of his influence on decolonization studies.

‘Matriliny did not become patriliny!’

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-312
Author(s):  
Janaki Abraham
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Right ◽  
Strong Norm ◽  
A Share

In contrast to a preoccupation with Nayar matriliny, in this article I look at the transformations of matrilineal tharavad houses among the Thiyyas who ranked below the Nayars in the caste hierarchy and were not generally large landowners. Moving away from the more exotic practices of matrilocality and duolocality, I look at matriliny coupled with a strong norm of virilocality in which a woman moved to her husband’s house after marriage. This enables an exploration of the implications of this residence norm for women, and particularly its implications for our understanding of the transformation of matrilineal kinship in Kerala. Paying special attention to the experience of women in tharavad houses and the creation of new houses, coupled with the continuities in the right that a woman retains to residence in her natal house and a right to a share of the property, forces us to question the common sense understanding that matriliny has transformed to patriliny.

The Pathological Sublime: Pleasure and Pain in the Racial Regime

2018 ◽  
pp. 44-68
Author(s):  
David Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
White Subject ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Common

“The Pathological Sublime” shows how Kant’s location of aesthetic experience in the subjective yet universal judgment of taste generates a concept of representation that is fundamentally racial and developmental. He labels Edmund Burke’s alternative approach to aesthetic affects “pathological,” meaning an unfree state based on sensation, fear or desire. The pathological subject is the antithesis of the ethical human who can participate in civil society through sharing the common sense that grounds aesthetic universality. Burke’s reflections on the sublime horror inspired by the sight of a black woman mark the limit of the argument for universality he bases on sensations. Where Frantz Fanon’s racial phenomenology of being seen in Black Skin White Masks dramatizes his “lived experience” of being barred from human identity, Burke’s anecdote foregrounds the anxious abyss into which the encounter with blackness throws the white subject and his representational schemas.

The Legacy of Reid's Common Sense in Analytic Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Mark Boespflug
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
The Common

The common sense that heavily informs the epistemology of Thomas Reid has been recently hailed as instructive with regard to some of the most fundamental issues in epistemology by a burgeoning segment of analytic epistemologists. These admirers of Reid may be called dogmatists. I highlight three ways in which Reid's approach has been a model to be imitated in the estimation of dogmatists. First, common sense propositions are taken to be the benchmarks of epistemology inasmuch as they constitute paradigm cases of knowledge. Second, dogmatists follow Reid in taking common sense propositions to provide boundaries for philosophical theorizing. Inasmuch as philosophical theorizing leads one to deny a common sense proposition, such theorizing is stepping outside of the bounds of what it can or should do. Third, dogmatists follow Reid in focusing heavily on the problem of skepticism and by responding to it by refusing to answer the demand for a meta-justification that the skeptic wants.

Thomas Reid on Causation and Scientific Explanation

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Barrantes ◽  
Juan M. Durán
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Common

We argue that there is no tension between Reid's description of science and his claim that science is based on the principles of common sense. For Reid, science is rooted in common sense since it is based on the (common sense) idea that fixed laws govern nature. This, however, does not contradict his view that the scientific notions of causation and explanation are fundamentally different from their common sense counterparts. After discussing these points, we dispute with Cobb's ( Cobb 2010 ) and Benbaji's ( Benbaji 2003 ) interpretations of Reid's views on causation and explanation. Finally, we present Reid's views from the perspective of the contemporary debate on scientific explanation.

Motives of espionage against ones own country in the light of idiographic studies

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Michalak
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
The Common

Motives of espionage against ones own country in the light of idiographic studies The money is perceived as the common denominator among people who have spied against their own country. This assumption is common sense and appears to be self-evident truth. But do we have any hard evidences to prove the validity of such a statement? What method could be applied to determine it? This article is a review of the motives behind one's resorting to spying activity which is a complex and multifarious process. I decided to present only the phenomenon of spying for another country. The studies on the motives behind taking up spying activity are idiographic in character. One of the basic methodological problems to be faced by the researchers of this problem is an inaccessibility of a control group.

Some thoughts on lexemes, the dome, and inner speech

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
William Benzon
Keyword(s):  
Language Development ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Cognitive Structure ◽  
External World ◽  
Inner Speech ◽  
Neural Systems ◽  
The Common

Sydney Lamb’s model focuses our attention on the physicality of language, of the signs themselves as objects in the external world and the neural systems the support them. By means of the metaphor of a cognitive dome, he demonstrates that there is no firm line between linguistic and cognitive structure. In this context, I offer physically grounded accounts of Jakobson’s metalingual and emotive functions. Drawing on Vygotsky’s account of language development, I point out that inner speech, corresponding to the common sense notion of thought, originates in a circuit that goes through the external world and is then internalized.

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