Conversation and critique within the architectural design process: a linkograph analysis

Conversation and critique are central to architectural design practice as they function as tools for probing and further improving design ideas. We study the kind of design activities that take place in such conversation and critique within the architectural design process. We use linkographs to characterise the design process taking place during conversation. More precisely, we study conversations between design teachers and design students. In this article, an example design process is considered that takes place via a traditional face-to-face meeting. Using the resulting linkograph, we are able to assess the kind of design activity taking place during such sessions of conversation and critique

Reflexive Learning and Performative Failure

In this paper we emphasize the importance of context for student learning. Based on reflective logs and interview data, we explore how students learn outside of the classroom as they undertake an experiential dissertation project. We identify three different forms of reflexive learning and critique, all triggered by some form of performative failure; scholarly critique, engaged critique and engaged action. Drawing on Butler’s theory of performativity we illustrate how reflexivity is not purely the action of any individual student, rather it is a practice that is co-created within a certain context. As such, we contest individualistic understandings of reflexivity and encourage a careful consideration of the places students and managers are encouraged to be reflexive

Critique [of Institutional Racism]

Vine Deloria’s incisive analysis of institutional racism in western culture applies equally well to the related problem of institutional sexism. Both women, and minorities especially individual members of minority racial groups who are immediately recognizable by members of the dominant white culture - belong to a caste rather than a class in western society. As such, we are all subjected by the traditions of white male philosophical. and intellectual processes as much as by existing socio-political institutions to the different varieties of exclusion, co-optation and disempowerment that Deloria outlines. In the past decade particularly, women’s situation in American political and institutional life has replicated the stasis and frustration experienced by racial minorities for many years preceding

Beyond psychologisation: the non-psychology of the Flemish novelist Louis Paul Boon

Is not the most intriguing aspect of psychologisation seems to be that every critique threatens to bounce back in some kind of meta-psychologisation. Although in this day and age and age it seems highly unlikely to repeat the popular anti-psychiatry movement of some decades ago and to get an anti-psychology movement on the tracks, it would leave us immediately stranded in some kind of essentialization of the human being and its life-world. Are we thus lost in psychologisation? Is there no outside of psychology and psychologisation? In the following I will focus on the novel De Paradijsvogel (The Bird of Paradise) of the leftist Flemish novelist Louis Paul Boon. I will briefly juxtapose it with Christopher Lasch‘s seminal critique in his book The Culture of Narcissism and search for the germs of a non-psychology: which is, a critique on psychologisation which transcends the pitfalls of metapsychologisation and reopens the path of an ideology critique, the latter seemingly having become impossible too

(WP 2018-02) Extending Behavioral Economics’ Methodological Critique of Rational Choice Theory to Include Counterfactual Reasoning

This paper extends behavioral economics’ realist methodological critique of rational choice theory to include the type of logical reasoning underlying its axiomatic foundations. A purely realist critique ignores Kahneman’s emphasis on how the theory’s axiomatic foundations make it normative. I extend his critique to the theory’s reliance on classical logic, which excludes the concept of possibility employed in counterfactual reasoning. Nudge theory reflects this in employing counterfactual conditionals. This answers the complaint that the Homo sapiens agent conception ultimately reduces to a Homo economicus conception, and also provides grounds for treating Homo sapiens as an adaptive, non-optimizing, reflexive agent

Power-knowledge and critique in Australian legal education : 1987-2003

While the word 'critique' appeared frequently in Australian legal education texts between 1987 and 2003, the meaning and the emphasis accorded critique varied widely. Michel Foucault's ideas about the close relationship between knowledge and power provide a theoretical framework within which this inconsistency of meaning and emphasis can be described, analysed and explained. Rather than monolithic, the discipline of legal education was by 2003 a dynamic nexus of distinct and competing discourses: doctrinalism, vocationalism, corporatism, liberalism, pedagogicalism and radicalism. Each of these six discourses was simultaneously a form of knowledge and an expression of disciplinary power within the law school. As a form of knowledge, each discourse accorded critique a different meaning and a different emphasis as a consequence of a range of historical, social and political contingencies. As an expression of power, each discourse was an attempt to achieve a set of objectives including the universalisation of a particular approach to the teaching of law and the enhancement of the status of a particular role within the law school. Critique, in a variety of forms, was a strategy employed by each discourse in order to achieve these objectives and to dominate and displace competing discourses

Comments on Knowledge and Ideology: The Epistemology of Social and Political Critique

Michael Morris' Knowledge and Ideology is an original and valuable contribution to the philosophical debate concerning the meaning and validity of the concept of ideology critique. While the concept of ideology has occupied a pivotal role within the tradition of critical social theory, as Terry Eagleton had already pointed out in his 1994 study, the term nevertheless has "a whole range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with one another." Morris takes Eagleton's analysis as his point of departure, distinguishing between "epistemic" and "functional" varieties of ideology critique. Unlike Eagleton's earlier study, however, which focused on the historical development of these two dominant ways of conceiving ideology, Morris' work attempts to show how the cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions of belief can be productively reconciled in a "Neo-Hegelian variation of epistemic ideology critique." Morris' work makes a compelling case that critical social theory can be sensitive to the social dimensions of belief without abandoning the legitimate goals of the traditional epistemological project. I have some questions, however, regarding how he proposes to reconcile these two competing visions of ideology critique