From biblical exegesis to crises of european modernity: Reflections on girardian theory and its limitations

Over the last two decades the field of ‘Girard studies’ – the application of René Girard's theories on mimetic desire and sacrificial violence to cultural artifacts – has tended to focus increasingly on Biblical texts and theological implications of Girard's interpretation of Christianity as a ‘theory of man.’ After summarizing Girardian theory in its current form, this essay stresses the applicability of the theory to François Furet's reading of the crisis of bourgeois culture and to Pascal Bruckner's reading of the malaise of the post Cold War world and the ethnic crises associated with the break‐up of the former Yugoslavia. This essay also demonstrates how Girardian theory illuminates the recent historical and judicial crises associated with France's efforts to come to terms with the memory and legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. The essay concludes with a brief assessment of the advantages as well as the pitfalls of employing Girardian theory to demystify the crises of modernity.     

VAM on trial: judging science in teacher evaluation lawsuits

ABSTRACT

Value Added Modeling (VAM) is a statistical technology used to evaluate teacher effectiveness. While it was heralded for years as the next big innovation in education reform, VAM has become an object of legal scrutiny since it was implemented in dozens of states across the U.S. Building on STS findings about science and the law, this paper considers the lawsuits involving VAM as an opportunity to analyze the contestation of expertise in court. It finds that not only is there a great deal of variation in terms of how expertise gets constructed in legal settings, leading to very different outcomes, but also that judges’ assessments of VAM are conducted such that they are implicitly adjudicating what constitutes proper science. Contrary to the idea that judges conform to criteria for evaluating expertise imposed by the scientific community limiting themselves to the inclusion or exclusion of expertise, in the case of VAM the legal system is asserting its own vision of how science should operate and thus making judgments about what counts authentically as science.     

Science Advice as Procedural Rationality: Reflections on the National Research Council

Since its founding in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has occupied a special niche in the complex ecology of advice-giving in the United States. Established as a small, private organization with special responsibilities and obligations vis à vis the American people and government, the Academy has expanded considerably in the past century and a half and now releases, through the National Research Council (NRC), its operating arm, more than 200 reports per year, on topics covering nearly the entire range of science, engineering, health, and education. The development of the organization, its basic ethos, and its evolving structures and processes can be seen as examples of what Herbert Simon called “procedural rationality”: the pursuit of reasonably good solutions to complex problems based on appropriate deliberation.