Prediction in Sociology: Prospects for a Devalued Activity

1999 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 57-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Aldridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Core Element ◽  
Taboo Word ◽  
The Public

The nineteenth-century founders of sociology were in no doubt that sociology is a predictive discipline. This was a key component of its constitution as a science, in contrast to religious mythology and metaphysics. Comte's formula ‘Savoir pour prévoir et prévoir pour pouvoir’ neatly captures the mood and mission of the sociological enterprise at its foundation. As the twentieth century closes, prediction has become almost a taboo word, connoting an embarrassing affiliation to vulgar positivism, scientism and technocracy. This article argues that many of our current fears about prediction are exaggerated or misplaced. If sociology is to regain its standing in the public domain we need to reclaim prediction as a core element in the sociological project.

scholarly journals Zaynab al-Ghazālī’s Women, Marriages, and Contradictions: Her Life as an Archive

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-80
Author(s):  
Lucia Carminati
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Teaching ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Islamic Society ◽  
Geographical Context

Zaynab al-Ghazālī (1917-2005) is regarded as a pioneering figure in the field of women’s preaching and religious teaching in Egypt. Her story, however, remains largely undocumented. In Western scholarship, al-Ghazālī has often been framed in terms of a contradictory figure, whose own choices flagrantly undercut her statements on the role of women in Islamic society. Trying to go beyond this type of appraisal, her writings are analyzed in order to question whether or not Zaynab al-Ghazālī’s intellectual genealogy should be understood within the context of her considerable exposure to a well-developed discourse of women’s rights at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, she made available to Muslim women a particular field of arguments, while foreclosing for them certain possibilities for action. Overall, her statements and choices in life need to be read as a function of her historical and geographical context and her positioning needs to be framed within the consciousness on the role women had come to play in the public domain.

Bengali Women’s Writings in the Colonial Period: Critique of Nation, Narration, and Patriarchy

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Sanchayita Paul Chakraborty ◽  
Dhritiman Chakraborty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Women's Agency ◽  
The Public ◽  
Indian Tradition ◽  
Women’S Agency ◽  
Spiritual Commitment

Abstract Critical engagements like the first autobiography written by a Bengali woman, Rasasundari Devi, and the non-fictions by Kailashbasini Devi, Krishnabhabini Das, and other women writers in the second half of the nineteenth century contested the imagined idealization of the Hindu domesticity and conjugality as spaces of loveableness and spiritual commitment. They criticized coercion in child-marriages and the forceful injunctions of the Hindu scriptures on both married and widowed women. Such rhetoric of quasi empowerment needs to be disaggregated to perpetuate issues of ‘double colonization,’ ‘dual-hold’ in feminism in India. The question is whether there can be any grounds of women’s agency in the Indian tradition. Eurocentric critiques are ill-equipped to politicize all modalities of a culture of social exclusion in Hindu imaginaries. Henceforth, as questions of equality, emancipation, and empowerment are fiercely debated in the public domain in contemporary India, we need to argue how immanent dissenting woman subjectivity can originate to counteract multiple patriarchies formed in Indian immediacies.

Public-Private Symbiosis in Nashville Special Education

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherman Dorn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Religious Education ◽  
Private School ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Public Funds ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public

The conventional historiography describing a strict public-private divide in United States schooling is misleading. The standard story claims that public schooling was a fuzzy concept 200 years ago; the division between public and private education for children thus developed largely over the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, public funds went to many private schools and even large private systems, such as the New York Public School Society. In some instances, public funds went to parochial education, either explicitly or as part of an arrangement to allow for diverse religious instruction using public funds. However, the nineteenth century witnessed growing division between public and private, largely excluding religious education (or at least non-Protestant religious education). By the end of the nineteenth century, the standard educational historiography suggests, public schools meant public in several senses: funded from the public coffers, open to the public in general, and controlled by a public, democratically controlled process. Tacit in that definition was a relatively rigid dividing line between public and private school organizations. Historians know that this implicit definition of “public” omits key facts. First, the governance of public schools became less tied to electoral politics during the Progressive Era. Public schooling in nineteenth-century cities generally meant large school boards, intimately connected with urban political machines. By the 1920s, many city school systems had smaller boards in a more corporate-like structure. The consolidation of small rural school districts in the first half of the twentieth century completed this removal of school governance from more local politics. A second problem with the definition above is unequal access to quality education (however defined). Historically, the acceptance of all students was true only in a limited sense, either in access to schools at all (with the exclusion of many children with disabilities) or, more generally, to the resources and curriculum involved in the best public schooling of the early twentieth century (as with racial segregation).

Pages from a Yellow Press: Print Culture, Public Life and Political Genealogies in Modern Brazil

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-379
Author(s):  
JAMES P. WOODARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Radical Republicanism

AbstractAn examination of the Brazilian newspaper O Combate, this article accomplishes four goals. First, it defines the politics of a periodical long cited but little understood by historians. Second, it documents O Combate's place, alongside other ‘yellow press’ outlets, in the making of a ‘public sphere’ in São Paulo. Third, it situates the same publications' role in the bringing into being of a more commercial, publicity-driven press, which would shed the yellow press's radicalism and abet the collapse of the public sphere of its heyday. Fourth, it suggests that O Combate's radical republicanism was one fount of the democratic radicalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as well as of the regionally chauvinist constitutionalism of 1932–7. In this rare application of the ‘public sphere’ idea to twentieth-century Brazil, readers may also detect an account closer to Jürgen Habermas’ original formulation than that found in the historiography of nineteenth-century Spanish America.

THE DEAD STILL AMONG US: VICTORIAN SECULAR RELICS, HAIR JEWELRY, AND DEATH CULTURE

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lutz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Death Culture ◽  
The Moment

By the time the nineteenth centuryreached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance: Theater and Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial India. By Nandi Bhatia. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004; pp. vi + 206 pp. $49.50 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-313
Author(s):  
Ananda Lal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
The Public ◽  
Secondary Material ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
The Subject

There are few dependable books in English on political theatre in India. Professor Bhatia's collection of essays, therefore, fills a long-felt need. She introduces the subject contextually, followed by four chapters chronologically examining key areas (British censorship of nationalistic drama, Indianizations of Shakespeare as an anticolonial statement, the Indian People's Theatre Association as a mass phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century, and Utpal Dutt's reinterpretation of Raj history in his play The Great Rebellion 1857), and concludes with a short epilogue on contemporary activist theatre by women. Most valuably for theatre historians, she places in the public domain many primary sources previously untapped in English, and unearths much secondary material that has escaped academic attention. Not least of all, she writes articulately and readably.

The Rise and Fall of Phrenology in Australia

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 518-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. John Thearle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Status ◽  
Lay Members ◽  
The Mind

In the first half of the nineteenth century phrenology, which was claimed to be the first science of the mind, experienced enormous popularity in the western world. It gave rise to a widespread movement attracting the attention of the professional and lay members of society. In Australia, as elsewhere, it had influence in penology and criminology, psychiatry, notions of racial inferiority, education, anthropology and popular application. By the second half of the nineteenth century, following advances in the knowledge of neuro-anatomy, it became relegated to the status of a pseudo-science. As such, it remained popular with charlatans and the public well into the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Scientists to the streets. Science, politics and the public moving towards new osmoses

2002 ◽  
Vol 01 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Castelfranchi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Standard Model ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Semipermeable Membrane ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Standard Model

What may be defined as the "standard model" of the public communication of science began to develop in the second half of the nineteenth century, gained a clear structure (especially in an Anglo-Saxon context) in the first three decades of the twentieth century and dominated until the nineties. Roughly speaking, the model tends to describe science as a compact social (and epistemic) corpus, largely separated from the rest of society by a type of semipermeable membrane. That is, information and actions can flow freely from science to the rest of society (through the application of technologies and the spread of scientific culture, for instance), but much more limitedly in the opposite direction (through science politics or the influence of sociocultural events on science itself).

Knowledge and Social Networks in the Construction of Elite Lawyers in Venezuela

2010 ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Manuel A. Gňmez
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Networks ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Group ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Political Transition ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Personal Connections

This article describes the rise of Venezuelan lawyers as members of the country's intellectual and social leadership, and their notable influence throughout different historic periods, from their key contribution to the consolidation of the country's political and intellectual leadership during the nineteenth century, to their emergence as power brokers bridging the public and private sectors during the economic and social expansions that took place during most of the twentieth century. This work also explains how, in spite of the radical political transition that took place in the late 1990s and which led to the disappearance of the traditional elites, the new regime created the conditions for the emergence of new networks in similar fashion to the ones that existed in the past, revealing that regardless of which particular social group is in power personal connections remain vital in making the justice system work, and the presence of lawyers is very important.

William Gore: A Puseyite in Parramatta

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Robert Willson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Primary Material ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article examines the way one nineteenth-century clergyman of the Church of England in Australia, William Gore, was influenced by the Oxford Movement. Gore was the incumbent of the parish of All Saints Church, North Parramatta in Sydney. He implemented liturgical practices valued by the Oxford Movement, including wearing a surplice to preach rather than a Geneva gown, reading the Offertory sentences in the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer, celebrating the Holy Communion on the saints days set in the Prayer Book and placing a cross on the holy table. He was supported by his bishop, William Grant Broughton. The reaction from parishioners was surprise, shock and opposition and he was branded as a ‘Puseyite’. This article uses local primary material, including press reports of parish meetings, to describe the reactions of parishioners in parish meetings against Gore’s liturgical uses. Gore’s activities are assessed as an important early example of the Oxford Movement’s influence in the Church of England in Australia. Gore’s practices, discussed in the public domain, provide evidence that the Oxford Movement was beginning to transform the nineteenth-century liturgical worship of the Church of England in Australia.

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