Engaged Encounters

Engaged Encounters: Thinking about Forces, Fields and Friendships with Monique Nuijten is a festschrift celebrating the scholarly, professional and personal contributions and insights of Monique Nuijten. As a creative scholar, Monique is known for her theoretical contributions to the study of development, social movements, the state, organizations, and corruption - to name a few topics. She inspires many senior and junior colleagues, as well as students, with innovative concepts like 'force fields' and development as a 'hope-generating machine'. Nuijten grounds her theoretical interventions in fine-grained ethnographic observations with a keen and sympathetic eye for the diverse actors that inhabit the structures of power and patterns of inequality she encounters. For Nuijten, theoretical and ethnographic endeavors are deeply interwoven with personal and political engagements, most recently illustrated through her research on social movements in urban settings in Brazil and Spain. The intersection of these three integrated dimensions in Monique Nuijten's oeuvre and life - the theoretical, collegial and personal - are brought out clearly in the forty contributions that each in their own way, acknowledge her unique combination of intellectual sharpness and personal warmth. As such, Monique Nuijten's scholarly life embodies an exemplary model of engaged scholarship.

This inspiring collection of 72 critical and creative contributions honouring the life and work of Desmond Mpilo Tutu comprises a rich and diverse array of reflections on the ecumenical global struggle against Apartheid, and Archbishop Tutu’s role therein, as a political priest, prophet and intellectual. The encounters with ‘the Arch’ and his work has shaped ongoing faith-based, activist and academic pursuits for justice, peace and dignity. Anyone familiar with his outstanding contributions to the promotion of justice, dignity and peace, will know that a hallmark of Desmond Tutu’s celebrated style is his use of narrative and real-life stories. In honour of his unique and remarkable example, the contributions in this book combine oral history and written history paradigms, as well as sociological, philosophical and theological approaches. While the book is meant to be a memorial recollection of encounters with the Arch, the hope is that these recollections will continue to inspire collective struggles and hopes for justice, peace and dignity.

Thinking is a dynamic process resulting from practices of integration. Thought encounters in openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation confer upon us intellectual work that is uniquely our own. Digital patterns, however, distract us from these creative encounters. Our intellectual searching is weakened and fragmented by frenetic consumption of information. We miss out on reason’s innate pull toward integration and concrete reality. This book is an invitation to enter into openness, wonder, receptivity, and contemplation with deeper understanding and intentionality. We can do this by considering exemplars, persons who lived out the integrity of their hard-won beliefs. Each process of integration is applied also, so that practical knowledge and practice become a way into this intellectual restoration. We need deeper knowledge won in the slow orbit of encounters. Encounters in thought are precisely what each generation needs to apprehend the cosmos, nature, authority, truth, and moral action. Responsibility to this ecologic age requires a reform of reason; this book is just one attempt to convey a way toward this restoration.

Drawing on social science conversations at a lively café in Bristol, this highly original book explores the value of public engagement in a wider social science context. The chapters range from themes such as the dialogic character of the social sciences, pragmatism in responses, and the underpinnings of managerial approaches to the restructuring of higher education. The first part reflects upon the different social and political inflections of public engagement. It is followed by chapters based upon talks at the café that were concerned with public engagement and the contribution of social science to a reflexive understanding of the dilemmas and practices of daily life. Together, the contributors offer a refreshing look at the role of social science in the societies it examines.--

A wide-ranging and accessible approach to Godard’s later work, and a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics.

Encounters with Godard takes the reader on a personal voyage into the sensory pleasures and polyphonic rhythms of Jean-Luc Godard’s multimedia work since the late 1970s, from his feature films and video essays to his published writings, art books, and media performances. Godard, suggests James S. Williams, lays ethical claim to the cinematic, defined in the broadest terms as relationality and artistic resistance. An introductory chapter on the extended history of La Chinoise (1967), a film explicitly of montage, is followed by seven different types of critical encounters with Godard, encompassing the fields of art and photography, music and literature, and foregrounding themes of gender and sexuality, race and violence, mystery and emotion. The Godard who emerges here is a restless and radical experimenter who establishes new cinematic thresholds through new technology and expands the creative potential and free exchange of the archives. Williams examines works including Nouvelle vague (1990), Film socialisme (2010), Hélas pour moi (1993), and the magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). Wide-ranging and accessible, Encounters with Godard marks a major intervention in the study of film aesthetics and ethics while forging a vital dialogue with literature, history and politics, art and art history, music and musicology, philosophy, and aesthetics.

“A landmark contribution to our understanding of Godard and of modernist expression as a whole.” — David Sterritt, author of The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible

“Writing with a delirious lucidity, Williams opens Godard to debate and dialogue that informs, extends, opens, and illuminates what may be the greatest and most complex body of cinema of the last half-century.” — Tom Conley, author of Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema

The study of every unit of social organization must eventually lead to an analysis of the interaction of its elements. The analytical distinction between units of organization and processes of interaction is, therefore, not destined to divide up our work for us. A division of labor seems more likely to come from distinguishing among types of units, among types of elements, or among types of processes. Sociologists have traditionally studied face-to-face interaction as part of the area of “collective behavior”; the units of social organization involved are those that can form by virtue of a breakdown in ordinary social intercourse: crowds, mobs, panics, riots. The other aspect of the problem of face-to-face interaction—the units of organization in which orderly and uneventful face-to-face interaction occurs—has been neglected until recently, although there is some early work on classroom interaction, topics of conversation, committee meetings, and public assemblies. Instead of dividing face-to-face interaction into the eventful and the routine, I propose a different division—into unfocused interaction and focused interaction. Unfocused interaction consists of those interpersonal communications that result solely by virtue of persons being in one another’s presence, as when two strangers across the room from each other check up on each other’s clothing, posture, and general manner, while each modifies his own demeanor because he himself is under observation. Focused interaction occurs when people effectively agree to sustain for a time a single focus of cognitive and visual attention, as in a conversation, a board game, or a joint task sustained by a close face-to-face circle of contributors. Those sustaining together a single focus of attention will, of course, engage one another in unfocused interaction, too. They will not do so in their capacity as participants in the focused activity, however, and persons present who are not in the focused activity will equally participate in this unfocused interaction. The two papers in this volume are concerned with focused interaction only. I call the natural unit of social organization in which focused interaction occurs a focused gathering, or an encounter, or a situated activity system. I assume that instances of this natural unit have enough in common to make it worthwhile to study them as a type. Three different terms are used out of desperation rather than by design; as will be suggested, each of the three in its own way is unsatisfactory, and each is satisfactory in a way that the others are not. The two essays deal from different points of view with this single unit of social organization. The first paper, “Fun in Games,” approaches focused gatherings from an examination of the kind of games that are played around a table. The second paper, “Role Distance,” approaches focused gatherings through a review and criticism of social-role analysis. The study of focused gatherings has been greatly stimulated recently by the study of group psychotherapy and especially by “small-group analysis.” I feel, however, that full use of this work is impeded by a current tendency to identify focused gatherings too easily with social groups. A small but interesting area of study is thus obscured by the biggest title, “social group,” that can be found for it.

Richard J. Bernstein is a leading exponent of American pragmatism and one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century. In this collection he takes a pragmatic approach to specific problems and issues to demonstrate the ongoing importance of this philosophical tradition. Topics under discussion include multiculturalism, political public life, evil and religion. Individual philosophers studied are Kant, Arendt, Rorty, Habermas, Dewey and Trotsky. Each of the sixteen essays, many of which are published here for the first time, offers a way of bridging contemporary philosophical differences. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy and those researching social and political theory.