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This paper analyzes two contemporary, „third-generation“ perspectives within critical theory - Nancy Fraser’s and Axel Honneth’s - with the aim of examining the degree to which the two authors succeed in grounding the normative criteria of social critique in the perspectives of ’ordinary’ social actors, as opposed to speculative social theory. To that end, the author focuses on the influential debate between Fraser and Honneth Redistribution or Recognition? which concerns the appropriate normative foundations of a „post-metaphysical“ critical theory, and attempts to reconstruct the fundamental 29 disagreements between Fraser and Honneth over the meaning and tasks of critical theory. The author concludes that both critical theorists ultimately secure the normative foundations of critique through substantive theorizations of the social, which frame the two authors’ „reconstructions“ of the normativity of everyday social action, but argues that post-metaphysical critical theory does not have to abandon comprehensive social theory in order to be epistmologically „non-authoritarian“.
Understanding the role of structure and social aspects regarding heat stress of people in urban areas requires an interdisciplinary scientific approach that connects methods from both natural sciences and social sciences. In this study, we combine three approaches to provide an interdisciplinary analysis of the structure and social components of heat stress in the city of Aachen, Germany. First, we assess the overall spatial structure of the urban heat island using spatially distributed measurements from mobile air temperature recordings on public transport units combined with spatially distributed geo-statistical data. The results indicate that the time of day matters: During the afternoon, areas with a relative low building density, like the industrial area northeast of the inner city, are the warmest, while surfaces in high-building-density areas like the inner city heat up faster during the evening. Second, we combine these measurements with place-based survey data collected in 2010 from residents aged 50 to 92 regarding their individual housing conditions, medical history and social integration to examine the match among heat-based stress of older residents, social conditions and elevated temperatures in their residential quarter. We identify disadvantaged areas for specific already-disadvantaged demographic groups in the city, pointing to a cumulation of inequalities, including heat stress among the most vulnerable. Third, we compare data of biometeorological measurements on urban public squares during the afternoon with results of the micrometeorological model ENVI-met to examine the spatial variability of the inner-city heat load. We complement the modelling results with on-site interviews to evaluate people’s heat perception at the same public places. A simulation shows that additional vegetation would increase thermal comfort at these public places, whereby the heat load assessed using the predicted mean vote (PMV) value would decrease by approximately 60 %. Furthermore, we demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of heat stress simulation. ENVI-met allows for an overall reasonable representation of heat load during stable atmospheric conditions. However, due to the setup and structure of ENVI-met, large-scale atmospheric changes that occur during the day cannot readily be integrated into ENVI-met simulations.
D2.1. provides further elaboration of the original research design and informs about ideas for the final Volume II of bEUcitizen. It is closely connected to task 1 of work package 2: specifying various concrete tasks for the different work packages and formulating overarching questions suitable to provide substantive cohesion and integration of the overall project. The elaboration of 10 crosscutting topics (to become chapters in the “horizontal” book, D2.3.) is a first step towards this goal. Discussing these cross-cutting topics is supposed to feed, infuse and inspire the work done in the different work packages and to build cross-cutting connections between them. Themes 1-10 merge into a valuable overview of the multi-faceted research on (EU) citizenship. They access the main issues of EU-citizenship and citizenship in general from different angles and different disciplines. Taken together these contributions help to identify barriers towards EU citizenship and ways to overcome them. Each Theme formulates questions how it might feed and be fed by further information and findings in the other work packages.
D2.1. is mainly meant for internal use. Its functions are firstly to inform about preliminary ideas, eventual contributions to planned final results and secondly to make out some more of less specific guiding questions that connect the work done by the single researchers in every different work package to the project as a whole. This task implies a normative yardstick, a clear picture of what would be a "good" EU citizenship practice. Elaborating on such a normative yardstick is a meta-topic that cuts across the range of cross-cutting topics presented in this working paper.
For more than two decades, the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences (NPOPSS) has been managing official funding of social science research in China under the orbit of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) propaganda system. By focusing on “Major Projects”, the most prestigious and well-funded program initiated by the NPOPSS in 2004, this contribution outlines the political and institutional ramifications of this line of official funding and attempts to identify larger shifts during the past decade in the “ideologics” of official social science research funding – the changing ideological circumscriptions of research agendas in the more narrow sense of echoing party theory and rhetoric and – in the broader sense – of adapting to an increasingly dominant official discourse of cultural and national self-assertion. To conclude, this article offers reflections on the potential repercussions of these shifts for international academic collaboration.
In my paper I take issue with proponents of ‘intersectionality’ which believe that a theoretical concept cannot/should not be detached from its original context of invention. Instead, I argue that the traveling of theory in a global context automatically involves appropriations, amendment and changes in response to the original meaning. However, I reject the idea that ‘intersectionality’ can be used as a freefloating signifier; on the contrary, it has to be embedded in the respective (historical, social, cultural) context in which it is used. I will start by mapping some of the current debates engaging with the pros and cons of the global implementation of the concept (the controversy about master categories, the dispute about the centrality of ‘race’, and the argument about the amendment of categories). I will then turn to my own use of ‘intersectionality’ as a methodological tool (elaborated in Lutz and Davis 2005). Here, we shifted attention from how structures of racism, class discrimination and sexism determine individuals’ identities and practices to how individuals ongoingly and flexibly negotiate their multiple and converging identities in the context of everyday life. Introducing the term doing intersectionality we explored how individuals creatively and often in surprising ways draw upon various aspects of their multiple identities as a resource to gain control over their lives.
In my paper I will show how ‘gender’ or ‘ethnicity’ are invariably linked to structures of domination, but can also mobilize or deconstruct disempowering discourses, even undermine and transform oppressive practices.
Obstetrical care as a matter of time: ultrasound screening in anticipatory regimes of pregnancy
(2014)
This article explores the ways in which ultrasound screening influences the temporal dimensions of prevention in the obstetrical management of pregnancy. Drawing on praxeographic perspectives and empirically based on participant observation of ultrasound examinations in obstetricians’ offices, it asks how ultrasound scanning facilitates anticipatory modes of pregnancy management, and investigates the entanglement of different notions of time and temporality in the highly risk-oriented modes of prenatal care in Germany. Arguing that the paradoxical temporality of prevention – acting now in the name of the future – is intensified by ultrasound screening, I show how the attribution of risk regarding foetal growth in prenatal check-ups is based on the fragmentation of procreative time and ask how time standards come into play, how pregnancy is located in calendrical time, and how notions of foetal time and the everyday life times of pregnant women clash during negotiations between obstetricians and pregnant women about the determination of the due date. By analysing temporality as a practical accomplishment via technological devices such as ultrasound, the paper contributes to debates in feminist STS studies on the role of time in reproduction technologies and the management of pregnancy and birth in contemporary societies.
The paper is aimed at contributing to an empirically grounded understanding of the psychosocial dynamics that underlie the relation between heteronormative images of masculinity, internalized heterosexism and health behavior of gay men in the global North. It is based on a qualitative interview study that focuses on the consequences of the internalization of dominant images of masculinity for the identity constructions of gay men and their HIV-related sexual risk behavior in Germany. In the paper it will be argued that 1) the tension between the authoritative image of masculinity that is determined by heteronormative discourses one the one hand and the gendered self-image that is shaped and threatened by connotations of a non-masculine homosexuality on the other constitutes a decisive issue of gay identity constructions, 2) a higher sexual risk behavior can be understood as a possible consequence of the internalization of masculine images and its impact on the self-esteem, if the self-image does not match the male ideal, and 3) this may include a paradoxical desire for the imagined masculinity that is experienced as violent with regard to one’s own psychodynamics. Finally, perspectives on gay masculinities that may transgress dominant heteronormative modes of subjectification are discussed.
Part IV of our series "Cyberpeace: Dimensionen eines Gegenentwurfs" on cyberpeace. Matthias Schulze argues that what some perceive as cyberwar is not actually war but rather cyber conflict. The question therefore arises if this conflict will ever be solved. Ben Kamis on the other hand identifies motives in the use of language. He argues that talking about cyberpeace reinforces the impression that we are right in the middle of a cyberwar. I would not agree with that. As Johan Galtung puts it: “The use of the term ‘peace’ may in itself be peace-productive” (Galtung 1969: 167). But how do we define cyberpeace? Who should define it and how do we pursue it?...