Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
Wacquant (1996) Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu
Wacquant, L. J. D. (1996). "Toward a reflexive sociology: A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu." Social theory and sociology: The classics and beyond: 213-229.
This is an article put together by Loic Wacquant and includes transcripts of talks given by Bourdieu to students studying his work. It is a good introduction to some of his tools and how they can be used for critical study of society.
Over the last two decades, the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has emerged as one of the most innovative, wide-ranging, and influential bodies of theories and research in contemporary social science. Cutting deeply across the disciplinary boundaries that delimit socio- logy, anthropology, education, cultural history, linguistics, and philosophy, as well as across a broad spectrum of areas of specialized sociological inquiry (from the study of peasants, art, unemployment, schools, fertility, and literature to the analysis of classes, religion, kinship, sports, politics, law, and intellectuals), Bourdieu's voluminous oeuvre presents a multi-faceted challenge to the present divisions and accepted modes of thinking of sociology. Chief among the cleavages it is striving to straddle are those which separate theory from research, sever the analysis of the symbolic from that of materiality, and oppose subjectivist and objectivist modes of knowledge (Bourdieu 1973c, 1977a, 1980a). Thus Bourdieu has for some time forsaken the two antinomies which have recently come to the forefront of theoretical discussions, those of structure and action on the one hand, and of micro- versus macro-analysis on the other.
In circumventing or dissolving these and other dichotomies (see Bourdieu 1987e, 1988c, 1988e; also Brubaker 1985, pp. 749-753), Bourdieu has been insistently pointing to the possibility of a unified political economy of practice, and especially of symbolic power, that fuses structural and phenomenologically-inspired approaches into a coherent, epistemologically grounded, mode of social inquiry of universal applicability-an Anthropologie in the Kantian sense of the term, but one that is highly distinctive in that it explicitly encompasses the activity of the social analyst who sets out to offer theoretical accounts of the practices of others (Bour- dieu 1980b, 1982a, 1987a, 1988a). Bourdieu's writings are also unique in that they comprise and blend the full range of sociological styles, from painstaking ethno- graphic accounts to sophisticated mathe- matical modelling to highly abstract meta- theoretical and philosophical arguments.