I drank the critical theory koolaid.

For our last LHA1803Y class of the term, we had a potluck in the class. I had fun putting together drinks:

Positivist koolaid: your standard red koolaid. People will disagree what the red is supposed to be -- cherry? strawberry? "red"? You grew up with it and remember it nostalgically but don't really want to have some now that you've had more grown up drinks.

Postpositivist koolaid: it's the same red koolaid as the positivist koolaid, but your drink comes garnished with a lemon slice.

Critical theory koolaid: the praxis of the sweet-yet-sour lemonade of theory with the harsh reality of ginger ale. While some would point out this is not actually "koolaid", they're missing the point. Drinking it makes you feel a little better about yourself.

Postmodernist "koolaid": there is no such thing as "koolaid", nor the little umbrella that your drink is garnished with. After all, "koolaid" exists only through discourse and is socially constructed. A Foucaultian archaeological analysis indicates that the discourse originates through a combination of cranberry juice and tonic water, its bitterness a nod to Nietzsche -- and the fact that the drink is an acquired taste that is generally seen as unpalatable without gin.

A quick and dirty introduction to Bourdieu for systems thinkers

I've been on a Bourdieu kick for the course I'm currently taking on social theory (LHA 1803Y: Theory in Higher Education), and since Steve Easterbrook mentioned he wasn't familiar with Bourdieu, I figured I'd write a quick and dirty introduction to Bourdieu's social theories. Steve's a systems thinker so this is written for such an audience.

In systems thinking we like to think of people as existing in many (overlapping) social systems (because, after all, pretty much everything to a systems thinker is a system.) These social systems can be things like school, work, a professional community, or even your favourite internet community.

Bourdieu would call those systems fields. (Specifically, a field is a system of social positions, with internal structure.) In his terminology, the rules determining the system/fields are known as nomos. (Fields are not the same as class, which I'll get to later.) When people in fields 'play by the rules' of the system, and invest in it, he calls this illusio.

If you're wondering if he also has paradigms in his systems, the answer is yes! He calls them doxa, the concepts and ideas which go without saying as it comes without saying -- "the universe of possible discourse".