Hi dj
What area of Social Policy and what sort of graduate degree? Perhaps
the best known and most politically contested area of social policy
research is illicit drug use. The war on drugs, as social policy,
contains all the critiques you write of. Especially in collision with
HIV/AIDS and the needs to stop a pandemic. How does one provide
education to drug users on safe drug use when this activity is both
illegal and the law is enforced by massive police budgets?
I could suggest looking at Strenger's writings on the Dutch
Junkiebondens. (Maybe someone has a reference, I don't have one to
hand. Should be able to find it doing a lit search, easy enough.)
Latour also may be of some use. Foucault, given his currency in Social
Science research is useful but I suspect can be limited by his
use of a technical vocabulary which tends to assume both a
familiarity with the traditional use of these terms in the history of
philosophy and also an ability to follow his particular usage, which
changes the ground somewhat or stretches these terms into a different
shape, perhaps resulting from Foucault's Nietzschian pill used to
cure the sickness of Hegelianism. The critique you have outlined has
been dealt with in a precise systematic way by a co-thinker of
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze. But here I hestitate, fearing I may be
throwing you into boiling oil, for to engage with this philosopher at
a graduate level will be demanding and possibly very difficult. Of
recent philsophers, Deleuze displays a sophisication and reading in
philosophy which is staggering and required a life long devotion. His
thought demands very rigorous readings. He does however directly
address the question you pose, perhaps most directly in D&Gs writing
on State science and nomadic science. (To be fair to Deleuze, he is
also a great teacher, sharpening the rigorous readers technical
skills in philosophy in a way few others can match, with the
exception of Spinoza, whose _Ethics_ are the closest to D&Gs _A
thousand plateaus_ in philsophical writings.)
If you reply with an answer to the first question, I or others may be
able to be more specific. What you propose is quite possible and it
has been done before. The best of luck with the thesis, sounds good.
chris Jones.
On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, you wrote:
>
>
> I am a post-grad student currently engaged in writing a thesis involving
> social policy analysis. It appears that those "powerful" forces to which I
> am attached (and subservient) are demanding implicitly, and to a much
> lesser degree explicitly, adherence to forms of theorising that will
> acknowledge (and perpetuate) the existence of a single, or (at the very
> least) sets of, "objectified realities".
>
> My problem is this, the fundamental premise on which my research thesis
> rests is the assumption that certainties, as objective truths, have created
> dogmatic discourses as "realities", that has resulted in a set of
> particular public policies that have missed, become iatrogenic, or have
> become just downright brutal and destructive to those who have been
> subjected to them. It seems that I am expected to utilise an "accepted"
> objectified theoretical framework, as "the" tool of analysis and
> interpretation, when it is this that I am actually arguing against.
[cut cj]
What area of Social Policy and what sort of graduate degree? Perhaps
the best known and most politically contested area of social policy
research is illicit drug use. The war on drugs, as social policy,
contains all the critiques you write of. Especially in collision with
HIV/AIDS and the needs to stop a pandemic. How does one provide
education to drug users on safe drug use when this activity is both
illegal and the law is enforced by massive police budgets?
I could suggest looking at Strenger's writings on the Dutch
Junkiebondens. (Maybe someone has a reference, I don't have one to
hand. Should be able to find it doing a lit search, easy enough.)
Latour also may be of some use. Foucault, given his currency in Social
Science research is useful but I suspect can be limited by his
use of a technical vocabulary which tends to assume both a
familiarity with the traditional use of these terms in the history of
philosophy and also an ability to follow his particular usage, which
changes the ground somewhat or stretches these terms into a different
shape, perhaps resulting from Foucault's Nietzschian pill used to
cure the sickness of Hegelianism. The critique you have outlined has
been dealt with in a precise systematic way by a co-thinker of
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze. But here I hestitate, fearing I may be
throwing you into boiling oil, for to engage with this philosopher at
a graduate level will be demanding and possibly very difficult. Of
recent philsophers, Deleuze displays a sophisication and reading in
philosophy which is staggering and required a life long devotion. His
thought demands very rigorous readings. He does however directly
address the question you pose, perhaps most directly in D&Gs writing
on State science and nomadic science. (To be fair to Deleuze, he is
also a great teacher, sharpening the rigorous readers technical
skills in philosophy in a way few others can match, with the
exception of Spinoza, whose _Ethics_ are the closest to D&Gs _A
thousand plateaus_ in philsophical writings.)
If you reply with an answer to the first question, I or others may be
able to be more specific. What you propose is quite possible and it
has been done before. The best of luck with the thesis, sounds good.
chris Jones.
On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, you wrote:
>
>
> I am a post-grad student currently engaged in writing a thesis involving
> social policy analysis. It appears that those "powerful" forces to which I
> am attached (and subservient) are demanding implicitly, and to a much
> lesser degree explicitly, adherence to forms of theorising that will
> acknowledge (and perpetuate) the existence of a single, or (at the very
> least) sets of, "objectified realities".
>
> My problem is this, the fundamental premise on which my research thesis
> rests is the assumption that certainties, as objective truths, have created
> dogmatic discourses as "realities", that has resulted in a set of
> particular public policies that have missed, become iatrogenic, or have
> become just downright brutal and destructive to those who have been
> subjected to them. It seems that I am expected to utilise an "accepted"
> objectified theoretical framework, as "the" tool of analysis and
> interpretation, when it is this that I am actually arguing against.
[cut cj]