adverb wrote:
that sounds interesting. what is the pomo-socio-perspective?
Oh, sorry. PoMo is just a nickname for postmodernism or postmodern.
Quote:
i read through the wikipedia for 'social constructionism' and it seemed like an academic marriage of social philosophy and cognitive science. going beyond, or behind, the concept of 'social constructionism', what would be a postmodern theory or sociological observation as it might be presented to the general public as opposed to academics? i'm imagining something like 'people eat fast food hamburgers excessively because dada is dead.', but i'm pretty ignorant in the ways of sociology.
In sociology, social constructionism is basically rooted in the interactionist (also called interpretivist) paradigm. Some of the Wikipedia articles on the subject, however, confuse social
constructionism, a sociological perspective, with
constructivism, a cognitive psychological perspective. In practice, there are only superficial similarities between them.
Social constructionism is rooted in the social phenomenology of Peter Berger and in the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault. The emphasis is on how people, in interaction, socially construct reality (including knowledge and power). If what we call
reality is constructed, it can also be deconstructed (and reconstructed). For instance, in my own research, I tend to be a postempiricist (or postpositivist). In other words, I recognize that different methodologies may produce (i.e., construct) different, even contradictory, results.
Psychological constructivism focuses on how individuals construct belief systems to make sense out of their experiences. The emphasis is on the individual, not on processes of social construction.