Critical Response Paper 1 Marc Schoendorf

University of Connecticut

Critical Response Paper 1

Introduction

The paper includes a crtical analysis to the reading that are discussed in the following section. This include considering about how the readings has provoked new ideas about the social policy for women, children and families in the United States. The article readings are supported by feminist theories.

Critical social science generally refers to social scientific production within specific critical traditions as Marxist sociology or feminism or to work that takes a specific political position. More specifically, sociological work can be thought of as critical in at least one of the two ways. It can be work that is critical of existing social relations and inequalities and that is aimed at changing those relations in some way, or it can be work that is critical of the traditional methods of sociology as quantitative surveys. What is distinctive about critical social science from critical social thought more generally is that despite its critical stance toward unreflexive uses of scientific methods, it has often been carried out in mainstream academic departments by scholars who have wished to retain the claim at science.

Critical Response

Feminist theories are multiple, hybrid, complex, and changing. There is no one homogeneous, unified feminism or feminist theory. And although it is impossible to illuminate all aspects and variations of feminist theories in this entry, even when narrowed to the field of curriculum studies, it is possible to say that feminist theories are conflicting as well as intertwined, in response to one another as well as to particular social and cultural contexts and historical moments. They are part of, and yet critique from diverse theoretical orientations, the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities. Further, in their many variants, they do center and simultaneously problematize conceptions of the categories woman and gender identity, for example, and the various situations, embodiments, contexts, and institutions that frame diverse lived realities (Hyde, 2010).

In the United States, critical social science is most often considered a post-World War II phenomenon. Though early unacknowledged scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois carried out work that is now claimed by critical social scientists, the explicit claim of work that was both critical and scientific dates from this time and is associated with Vance Packard and C. Wright Mills. Mills, who defined a critical position against the grand theory of functionalism and the abstract empiricism of opinion surveys, linked a critical method to a critical position against unjust institutions of American society. Mills, who in 1957 wrote The Power Elite, presented a particularly poignant critique of the functioning of American democracy: interlocking elites wielded power by the control of economic, political, and military institutions. These elites, who shared similar backgrounds, were a relatively small group of persons with similar goals and who were able to manipulate supposedly democratic processes. Other important critical scholars at the time were those associated with the Frankfurt school, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. They wrote on the culture industry and ...