SPECIAL SEMINAR

’Con-structuralism: an analytical integrative approach to investigating
the cognitive aspects of social movements’

Dr. S. A. Hamed Hosseini, School of Social Sciences, The Australian
National University

When: Tuesday 14 November, 12.00-2.00pm
Where: Room 210, Level 2, Building 3 (Corner of Harris St and Broadway), UTS
Access: Disabled access
Info: 9514 2714

In spite of the recent growing emphasis on the ideational dimension of collective actions, many theoretical attempts and the studies influenced by them evidence significant problems in explaining the historical emergence and development of movements’ cognitions. These problems stem from: (i) a failure at the metatheoretical level, that
is, their failure to hold an effective and integrative relation between ‘changing social structures’, ‘dynamic patterns of experience’ (or historical agency) and the actors’ social consciousness; (ii) inadequacy in the translation of metatheoretical assumptions into
analytical models. As I will discuss, this failure, in turn, is related to the overriding reductionist tendency among the theories to ignore the autonomous existence of cognition with respect to both human agency and social structures.

I start my discussion by examining the capacity of conventional theoretical endeavors to conceptualize and explain social movements. Then I will argue for the necessity of developing an integrative approach according to which the existential autonomy of collective ‘cognition’, in relation to both practical subjectivity of movement actors and conditioning social ‘structure’, is adequately acknowledged. The basics of such a synthesizing approach, coined here ‘con-structuralism’, will be finally outlined.