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Meta-narrative
In social theory, a metanarrative (also master narrative, or meta-narrative and grand narrative; or ) is an overarching narrative about smaller historical narratives, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea. The term was popularized by the writing of French people, French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in 1979. Metanarrative is considered a foundational concept of postmodernism. ''Master narrative'' and synonymous terms like ''metanarrative'' are also used in narratology to mean "stories within stories," as coined by Literary theory, literary theorist Gérard Genette. Examples of master narratives can be found in U.S. high school textbooks according to scholar Derrick Alridge: "history courses and curricula are dominated by such heroic and celebratory master narratives as those portraying George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as the heroic 'Founding Fathers,' Abraham Lincoln as the 'Great Emancipator,' and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Theory
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena.Seidman, S., 2016. Contested knowledge: Social theory today. John Wiley & Sons. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies (e.g. positivism and antipositivism), the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as " social criticism" or " social commentary", or " cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing. Definitions Social theory by definition is used to make distinctions and generalizations among different types of societies, and to analyze modernity as it has emerged in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Americans
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. African Americans constitute the second largest ethno-racial group in the U.S. after White Americans. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States. In 2023, an estimated 48.3 million people self-identified as Black, making up 14.4% of the country’s population. This marks a 33% increase since 2000, when there were 36.2 million Black people living in the U.S. African-American history began in the 16th century, with Africans being sold to European slave traders and transported across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. They were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies. A few were able to achieve freedom th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michel Foucault
Paul-Michel Foucault ( , ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French History of ideas, historian of ideas and Philosophy, philosopher who was also an author, Literary criticism, literary critic, Activism, political activist, and teacher. Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between Power (social and political), power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions. Though often cited as a Structuralism, structuralist and Postmodernism, postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels and sought to critique authority without limits on himself. His thought has influenced academics within a large number of contrasting areas of study, with this especially including those working in anthropology, communication studies, criminology, cultural studies, feminism, literary theory, psychology, and sociology. His efforts against homophobia and racial prejudice as well as against other Ideology, id ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of Power (social and political), power. Although different post-structuralists present different critiques of structuralism, common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially constructed structures.José Guilherme Merquior, Merquior, José G. 1987. ''Foucault'', (Fontana Modern Masters series). University of California Press. . ''Structuralism'' proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a Structural linguistics, structure that is modeled on language. As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract idea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Universality (philosophy)
Universalism is the Philosophy, philosophical and Theology, theological concept within Christianity that some ideas have Universal (metaphysics), universal application or applicability. A belief in one fundamental truth is another important tenet in universalism. The living truth is seen as more far-reaching than the national, cultural, or religious boundaries or interpretations of that one truth. A community that calls itself ''universalist'' may emphasize the universal principles of most religions, and accept others in an inclusive manner. In the modern context, universalism can also mean the Western pursuit of unification of all human beings across geographic and other boundaries under Western values, or the application of really universal or universalist constructs, such as human rights or international law. Universalism has had an influence on modern-day Hinduism, in turn influencing modern Western spirituality. Christian universalism refers to the idea that every human ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Postmodern Condition
Postmodernity (post-modernity or the postmodern condition) is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist ''after'' modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism. Postmodernity can mean a personal response to a postmodern society, the conditions in a society which make it postmodern or the state of being that is associated with a postmodern society as well as a historical epoch. In most contexts it should be distinguished from postmodernism, the adoption of postmodern philosophies or traits in the arts, culture ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Report On Knowledge
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, and others worldwide. Its name in English is '' a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version is often written in one of two forms: the double-storey and single-storey . The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English, '' a'' is the indefinite article, with the alternative form ''an''. Name In English, the name of the letter is the ''long A'' sound, pronounced . Its name in most other languages matches the letter's pronunciation in open syllables. History The earliest known ancestor of A is ''aleph''—the first letter of the Phoenician ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modernity
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular Society, socio-Culture, cultural Norm (social), norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissancein the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment. Commentators variously consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with World War II in 1945, or as late as the period falling between the 1980s and 1990s; the following era is often referred to as "postmodernity". The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe, without assigning it to either the modern or postmodern era. (Thus "modern" may be used as a name of a particular era in the past, as opposed to meaning "the current era".) Depending on the field, modernity may refer to different time periods or qualities. In historiography, the 16th to 18th centuries are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marxism
Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, and social transformation. Marxism originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive " Marxist theory". Marxism has had a profound effect in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts. In addition to the various schools of thought, which emphasize or modify elements of classical Marxism, several Marxian concepts have been incorporated into an array of social theories. This has led to widely varying conclusions. Alongside Marx's critique of political economy, the defining cha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emancipation
Emancipation generally means to free a person from a previous restraint or legal disability. More broadly, it is also used for efforts to procure Economic, social and cultural rights, economic and social rights, civil and political rights, political rights or Egalitarianism, equality, often for a specifically disenfranchised group, or more generally, in discussion of many matters. Among others, Karl Marx discussed political emancipation in his 1844 essay "On the Jewish Question", although often in addition to (or in contrast with) the term ''human emancipation''. Marx's views of political emancipation in this work were summarized by one writer as entailing "equal status of individual citizens in relation to the state, equality before the law, regardless of religion, property, or other 'private' characteristics of individual people." "Political emancipation" as a phrase is less common in modern usage, especially outside academic, foreign or activist contexts. However, simila ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment) was a European intellectual and philosophical movement active from the late 17th to early 19th century. Chiefly valuing knowledge gained through rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment was concerned with a wide range of social and political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state. The Enlightenment was preceded by and overlapped the Scientific Revolution, which included the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton, among others, as well as the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and John Locke. The dating of the period of the beginning of the Enlightenment can be attributed to the publication of René Descartes' ''Discourse on the Method'' in 1637, with his method of systematically disbelieving everything ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Progressivism
Progressivism is a Left-right political spectrum, left-leaning political philosophy and Reformism, reform political movement, movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform. Adherents hold that progressivism has universal application and endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere. Progressivism arose during the Age of Enlightenment out of the belief that civility in Europe was improving due to the application of new Empirical evidence, empirical knowledge.Harold Mah''Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914'' Cornell University. (2003). p. 157. In modern political discourse, progressivism is often associated with social liberalism, a left-leaning type of liberalism, and social democracy. Within economic progressivism, there is some ideological variety on the social liberal to social democrat continuum, as well as occasionally some variance on cultural issues; examples of this include some Christian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
