Social Sciences


Reflections on the peer supervision process

About five months ago the head psychiatrist at the clinic where I work approached me about starting a peer supervision group for the Interns and Externs training there. He wanted to construct a space where they could present and discuss their cases, receive feedback from their peers and also raise any issues that they were [...]

Eli or Thorkelson on the gender of the academic name

Eli Thorkelson, of decasia fame, makes some compelling observations about “the gender of the academic name“:
Anyway, my friend said she’d noticed that, when academics talk about other academics, they are likely to use the first and last name when referring to a woman academic, while men academics often get mentioned by last name only. This [...]

Going beyond unconditional acceptance: Carl Rogers and individual subjectivity

A joke told by my supervisor:
A client speaking to his Rogerian therapist says: “I am so depressed, I just don’t feel like is worth living.” The therapist replies: “I hear you saying that you are in pain and that you are not sure how you will ever feel better.” The client replies by saying: “I [...]

Speculative Realism and Animal Studies Discussion

The Inhumanities and Speculative Heresy are hosting a cross-blog event on the topic of critical animal studies from the perspective of speculative realism. The first post up – on Levinas, the Other, and animals – has set the stage for what promises to be a lively, rich discussion, centered around the following question:

While speculative realism [...]

Personal reflections on the therapeutic process: Learning from termination.

The process of terminating with ongoing psychotherapy patients, especially long-term patients (those generally seen for a year or more) is one that can be very meaningful and emotional for both therapist and patient. Termination has appropriately been linked with past experiences of loss and abandonment, existential fears of death and dying, as well as with [...]

From Psychodynamics to Semiotics: Revisiting Levenson

Donnel Stern’s introduction to the single volume edition of the psychoanalyst Edgar Levenson’s two major books, The Fallacy of Understanding (1972) and The Ambiguity of Change (1983) (published together by Analytic Press, 2005) attempts to both contextualize and highlight the important aspects of Levenson’s work. Not surprisingly, Stern’s introductory remarks are shaped by the current [...]

“The numbers don’t lie?: The problem of emergence in baseball and basketball statistics”

The role of statistics in sports can be generally stated as providing more objective and sophisticated evaluations of an athlete’s performance. At its heart, statistics are tools that can be used to increase a team’s chance of winning a game. In this sense, much like counting cards can help win at blackjack, keeping track of [...]

Jo Guldi on Mining Archives for ‘Knowledge Fissures’

Jo Guldi of Inscape has a provocative post up describing how she used available web-based tools to produce a rather sophisticated analysis of the use of the word pseudoscience in Wikipedia entries. Her hypothesis, to paraphrase, is that “pseudoscience” is less a rigorous, ’scientific’ term than a discursive ‘marker’ for attempts to delegitimize opposing arguments.
I [...]

Mass Personalization at the Bank

Zsuzsanna Vargha, a sociology PhD student at Columbia (–currently guest-blogging over at Socializing Finance), has made available a draft chapter from her forthcoming dissertation on client-customer interaction at a Hungarian bank. Her choice of field site couldn’t be more timely. For all the scholarship on consumption and the commodity, much less seems to have [...]

Real Culture in Virtual Worlds

In this month’s Journal of Virtual World Research, Tom Boellstorff, author of the much-praised Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human, makes an important observation about theories of culture in virtual worlds.
To concretize my concerns, it will prove helpful to consider the example of some recent work of the economist [...]

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