Critical theory

While international academic and research collaborations are of great importance at this
time, it is not easy to find researchers in the engineering field that publish in languages
other than English. Because of this disconnect, there exists a need for a portal to find
Who’s Who in Engineering Education in the Americas. The objective of this thesis is to
built an object-oriented architecture for this proposed portal. The Unified Modeling
Language (UML) model developed in this thesis incorporates the basic structure of a
social network for academic purposes. Reverse engineering of three social networks
portals yielded important aspects of their structures that have been incorporated in the
proposed UML model. Furthermore, the present work includes a pattern for academic
social networks.

The common intellectual ground shared by Mikhail Bakhtin and Georges Bataille routinely suffers from a dearth of consideration. Yet Bakhtin's celebrated "carnival" writings are invested in undeniably Bataillean interests---death, excess, transgression, heterogeneity. Both Bakhtin and Bataille inherited the Wagnerian Nietzsche's nostalgia for effusive communal ritual, collapsing the boundaries between bodies and the boundary between life and death (this is "transgression," eroticism , according to Bataille; too often transgression is spoken of in terms of stealing a pornographic magazine). Thus bodies in Bakhtin and Bataille are "open," mainly in comic and inglorious ways, and death is the cynosure of festival. Death for Bakhtin and Bataille is not negative; it is "sacred" (Bataille's term), serving as communal cement and a celebration of life. Not, however, life in the sense of 401k's and insurance. Rather, life as exuberance and generosity ("sovereignty" according to Bataille).

Thomas Kuhn's popular 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions failed to convince historians and philosophers of science of its validity as a theory. Instead, it became an overnight success in the humanities. New left-wing politics developed in academia rejecting not only science, but also traditional humanities, fueling an ideological shift away from academics to social politics. Besides the charge that Kuhn confuses history and sociology of science with logic and philosophy, inherent ambiguity and contradiction defy an accurate interpretation of the book. Critics of Kuhns' theory include Jaakko Hintikka, who maintains that an important but overlooked issue concerns what he calls the one-world linguistic view (lingua universalis) vs. the language as calculus view (calculus ratiocinator). Feted by the humanities as unimpeachable confirmation that the methods and theories of science were socially constructed, Revolutions helped justify relativism, attesting to undue dependence on reason as a culturally hegemonious Western practice.

Academic public administration (APA) supposedly provides theoretic and programmatic guidance for bureaucratic public administration (BPA). But in reality, a relationship best characterized as a gap between "theory" (APA) and "practice" (BPA) is deemed to exist between the two social practices. Scholars who have analyzed APA theoretic literature ascribed the theory-practice problematic to methodological inadequacies, the implication being that investment in appropriate social science methods would enhance the intellectual rigor and social utility of APA discursive works. To provide a much richer perspective on the theory-practice problematic, this study conceptualizes theoretic discourses as social actions. When scholars theorize, they invariably want to get things done, thus they are involved in social actions linked to some purposes, interests, and issues. As individuals with disciplinary affiliations and commitments, APA scholars bring purposes and interests to their work. So, what kinds of purposes underpin APA theoretic works? Since actions are meaningful within social practices, a corollary question is: What disciplinary influences constrain or authorize APA discourse, and why? To answer the questions posed: first, a discourse analytic method is utilized to analyze textual cohorts (i.e., authorial intentions, issues, themes, genre forms, and methods) in symposia articles published in five mainstream APA journals over a fifteen-year period. Second, a conceptual framework for understanding the disciplinary conditions authorizing and restricting theoretic discourse is outlined using the parameters of practice theory. Discourse analysis and practice theory are complimentary methodological and analytic tools. Discourse analysis focuses on discourse systems, whereas practice theory seeks to explain the relationships that obtain between human actions and social systems. In other words, discourse-practice approach focuses on the individuals' choices of discursive activities and explains how these choices are shaped by the social practices within which the discursive activities unfold. Using insights from practice theory, a speculative perspective relating the failure to reconfigure the discipline's telos in light of changed objective conditions is offered as the basis for the theory-practice problematic in academic public administration.