Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Argues that the most profound contribution of the feminist attack on the prevailing liberal paradigm of the state has been and continues to be the salience and importance of difference itself. Despite dangers feminists have experienced when having recourse to difference, a nonessentialist examination of difference--including particularity, historicity, subjectivity--reveals the importance of difference to politics in the 21st century.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: One of the most unfortunate features of International Relations as a discipline is the existence of a self-appointed "Philosophy of Science Police." When writing, presenting, debating, or publishing one's research, one always risks being told one's ontology is wrong or one's epistemology is untenable -- or worse, both. Ever since the emergence of the so-called "Third Debate" between positivists and post-positivists in the late eighties, philosophy-of-science arguments have been explicitly deployed by IR theorists in support of their own worldview and, even more frequently, as a weapon hurled against the world views of paradigmatic competitors. In this paper, we argue this approach to IR-theorizing is wrongheaded. Importing philosophy-of-science arguments into IR theory neither contributes to the resolution of the philosophical debates on which they draw nor advances our understanding of politics among states. We show why this is the case and advance an alternative perspective drawing on the pragmatic philosophy of science of Arthur Fine's "The Natural Ontological Attitude." We argue that NOA would serve well the purposes of political scientists in general and IR theorists in particular, as it is a minimalist philosophy of science aimed at insulating scientific practice from foundational philosophical questions that remain deeply contested within philosophy of science itself. By devolving scrutiny back to the internal standards of the field, a pragmatic approach to the philosophy of science makes room for theoretical and methodological pluralism.

Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The concepts such as the veil and the double consciousness introduced in The Souls of Black Folk, as well as his involvement in a photo exhibition in Paris in 1900 characterize W.E.B. Du Bois as one of the pioneering African American visual theorists. He explored the intricate difference between how African Americans perceived themselves and how society perceived them. Similar investigations of black images in American society rose in number as visual arts became more popular in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the foundational concepts Du Bois introduced early in the century enrich our knowledge of African American history, intellectual historians have disproportionately focused on his scholarship around the turn of the century, and have somewhat ignored how Du Bois developed his idea on black images later in his career. Du Bois extensively wrote and spoke on African American images as the U.S. witnessed an expansion in visual arts from movies to television. My paper examines Du Bois’ analyses of African American images in the first half of the twentieth century as described in his autobiographies, as well as other writings such as Dusk of Dawn, and in his speeches. It will reveal a new, and relatively pessimistic, dimension of the history of black images in the twentieth century.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In this essay, I argue that Alvin Gouldner’s critique of functionalism, although valuable, is not his major theoretical contribution. Rather, it is a portion of his larger, postmarxian theoretical project. Gouldner’s project not only questioned functional theory during its height as the dominant paradigm, it also brought conflict back into a conservative model and extended beyond Marxism in notable ways. The focus on Gouldner’s critique of Parsons renders invisible his other contributions, i.e. his differentiation of the “two Marxisms”, the theory of the New Class, and his notion of reflexive sociology. In this paper, I look at four different aspects of Gouldner's work to illustrate his larger contribution to Marxist and critical theory studies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this paper I argue that Immanuel Kant’s argument in “Perpetual Peace” is a useful theory for international relations and foreign policy. Despite the usefulness of his argument, I also argue that IR scholars have misread Kant’s argument and, subsequently, so have those who have tried to apply his theory to foreign policy. There are two sources of this problem. The first is based on a lack of a clear reading of all that Kant argues in “Perpetual Peace”. Most scholars have taken part of his argument and relied on that part alone; Kant’s argument, however, is holistic and cannot be taken in parts. The second source of this problem is with those scholars who have tried to take Kant’s theory (and any political theory for that matter) as explaining a world guided by law-like regularities. To argue against this, I use Alasdair MacIntyre‘s description of the early, renaissance, political philosopher who is often credited with first applying scientific realism to politics, Niccolo Machiavelli. Because of this argument, I am not only attempting to save Kant from liberal idealists, I want to save Machiavelli from scientific realists while undercutting scientific realism itself.