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This volume looks at informal political action which arises when
conventional frameworks, such as those provided by welfare states,
are in crisis or decline. At such times the usual expectations
about political action may not apply, so what actually goes on? A
specific emphasis on context - in particular the link between power
and knowledge and public argumentation in a given setting - is used
to trace the development of collective action. Key issues are
addressed, such as how informal political collectives come to
define their aims, what communication processes take place within
them, how far their action responds to that of other political
bodies, and how far these processes affect the results of what they
do. Discussion is based around a range of empirical case studies,
and we are shown that informal collective action is more widespread
and significant than many realize, and that it often occurs in
fields which appear to be non-political, such as in Swiss
neighbourhoods.
This book focuses on older people as makers of meaning and insight,
highlighting the evolving values, priorities and ways of
communicating that make later life fascinating. It explores what
creating 'meaning' in later life really implies, for older people
themselves, for how to conceptualise older people and for
relationships between generations. The book offers a language for
discussing major types of lifecourse meaning, not least those
concerning ethical and temporal aspects of the ways people
interpret their lifecourses, the ways older people form part of
social and symbolic landscapes, and the types of wisdom they can
offer. It will appeal to students of gerontology, sociological
methodology, humanistic sociology, philosophy, psychology, and
health promotion and medicine.
Taking a novel approach to ageing, this book focuses on older
people as makers of meaning and insight, highlighting the evolving
values, priorities, and ways of communicating that make later life
fascinating and rich. Ricca Edmondson explores what creating
meaning in later life really implies, for older people themselves,
for how older people are conceptualised, and for relationships
between generations.
How can we understand older people as real human beings, value
their wisdom, and appreciate that their norms and purposes both
matter in themselves and are affected by those of others? Using a
life-course approach, "Valuing older people" argues that the
complexity and potential creativity of later life demand a
humanistic vision of older people and ageing. It acknowledges the
diversity of experiences of older age and presents a range of
contexts and methodologies through which they can be understood.
Ageing is a process of creating meaning carried out by older
people, and is significant for those around them. This book,
therefore, considers the impact of social norms and political and
economic structures on older people's capacities to age in creative
ways. What real obstacles are there to older people's construction
of meaningful lives? What is being achieved when they feel they are
ageing well? This collection, aimed at students, researchers,
practitioners and policy-makers, offers a lively and constructive
response to contemporary challenges involving ageing and how to
understand it.
The capacity for reasonable argument about practical and political
matters is important to our daily lives. Yet what does arguing
really involve? Often, our very concept of what it is to argue
seems systematically distorted. Practical, political arguing is too
often stylized as hyper-cognitive, ending by treating people as
objects rather than other selves - in ways that are fundamentally
unreasonable. This book examines what follows from seeing people as
deliberating and acting in ways that intertwine a variety of
emotional and evaluative processes and effects of virtue or
character. From this point of view, practical arguing involves not
just cognition, emotion, and virtue, but also practices, including
imaginative practices. Politics of Practical Reasoning: Integrating
Action, Discourse and Argument uses these ideas to interrogate ways
in which reasoning is bound up with the interrelated lives that
human beings lead in their everyday, public and political worlds.
We build here on efforts to re-concretize practical reasoning in
modern traditions linked to phenomenology and Wittgensteinian
thought, also referring back to Aristotle and the Stoics in
classical times. Medieval theologians and philosophers such as
Aquinas confront the same issue, as do Enlightenment thinkers such
as Smith and Kant. Using the history of philosophical thought as
one of our major sources, the contributors sympathize with the link
underscored between interpretation, tradition and reasoning by
Gadamer, the stress placed on communicative and emancipatory action
by Habermas, and MacIntyre's notion of praxis as highlighting
deliberation within communities. All these approaches respond to
practical reasoning as practical. Building on these points of view,
the volume both explores what practical reasoning itself means, and
applies it to particular questions: what it means to respond to
arguments about meaningful work or disability, or how to debate
institutional ethics or art. None of these debates is susceptible
to exclusively cognitive or technical solutions; this does not mean
abandoning them to unreason. Practical and political reasoning is
examined here from an appropriately broad spectrum of approaches,
founded in a concern for what human reasoning can justifiably be
expected to involve, and what justifying it can reasonably be
expected to achieve.
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