The principal aim of this article is to examine the relations between positioning and belonging in terms of the potential for critique of existing social conditions. The underlying purpose is to inform social scientific engagement with social life in order to illuminate the potential for social transformation via reflexivity. These discussions will be informed by the division of reflexivity into two dimensions: endogenous and referential. It is argued that this enables the social scientist to highlight the pre-reflexive world and render (...) it problematic and demonstrates how the objectivity of the social world is both a presupposition and ongoing achievement of everyday interactions. To that extent, the possibility for social conditions to be otherwise is then open to scrutiny. (shrink)

This paper presents an empirical model for researching women’s self and social identities. The model was devised as a theoretical and methodological framework to assist the author to recognize self-identity and social identity in single women’s narratives of their lives. Self-identity is understood as our own sense of ourselves as persons while social identity is categorizations of us by others. For those interested in researching the consequences of strong ideologies on women’s identities, or for recognizing resistance and understanding the development (...) of new conceptions of womanhood, an empirical model which focuses our research attention on the self-identity of individual women is helpful. (shrink)

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have (...) explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning. (shrink)

According to Maria Markus, the development of a particularly open and interested moral-psychological disposition towards the other is critical to the endeavour of subjects to realize the decent society. Drawing on the work of George Herbert Mead, it will be argued that such a sense of decency involves not just a normative commitment to reciprocity but a reflexive appreciation of the significance of the other to the formation of the self. Meads sketches of intersubjective freedoms are shown to provide a (...) critical perspective on unjust social relations from the standpoint of the utopian horizon of a decent society. Meads conception converges, as well as contrasts, with Markuss perspective on civil society and the regulative ideal of the decent society. Significantly, Markuss account of the problem of the potential divergence between the decency of institutions and the decency of human relationships highlights the difficulties of interconnecting democratic justice and intersubjective freedoms. (shrink)

The major objective of this thesis is to provide an alternative to the predominant model of the Western urban home, arguing that it is more detrimental than beneficial to its inhabitants. In order to achieve this, it first explores the development of home through a genealogical analysis. It then considers the concepts with which it is traditionally connected, such as those of identity, safety, privacy and satisfaction, supporting that the idealised home hides numerous issues of concern. In order to form (...) a more comprehensive picture, the thesis draws on different philosophical approaches discussing the idea of home, while it explores a variety of contemporary habitation and home-making practices. The normative and overly-idealised domestic model, promoted in Western urban societies, is presented as detrimental both on a personal and on a social level. Therefore, alternatives are explored in Adorno’s ‘Hotel Room’, Jameson’s ‘Dirty Realism’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Nomadology’. The lack of viability characterising the abovementioned proposals leads to the examination of the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the Body without Organs; the home as a BwO provides the contemporary agents with the tools to reconstruct an autonomous space where they can recreate their personal discourse and influence the social ground accordingly. Through the analysis of home this thesis explores how and why it has been appropriated by systemic forces and highlights a very serious issue: the fact that our personal space is no longer personal. Simultaneously, a common concern of feminist and post-structuralist background is addressed regarding the process of self-redefinition and the ways to approach it. The response entails a reconstructed autonomous home with a respective influence on the public sphere. (shrink)