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My research can be grouped into
three
clusters, one dealing with sociobiological accounts of incest
avoidance among humans; another focusing on kinship and gender in urban
Australia; and yet another concentrating on pedagogy and
cognition in the
Middle East.
1. Cognition and
pedagogy: I am currently conducting a study of schooling and
pedagogy (particularly the instruction of languages) as a way to
explore
cognition as a social and cultural phenomenon. I launched this research
in 2004
with an investigation of Arabic teaching in the Hebrew sector in
Israel. I am
now focusing on traditional Islamic pedagogy. The research is concerned
with
three major themes as follows: the logic of the organisation of subject
matter
for instruction (especially the underlying, unarticulated
preconceptions of how
people learn, think and know); students’ learning styles
(especially the
cognitive aspects of learning style); and the underlying social
dynamics of
learning and their implications for cognition.
2. Kinship, gender and
sexuality: My work in this area builds on
Bourdieu’s sociology of practice and draws on cognitive
sciences’ methods for
the analysis of subjectivity, and on the phenomenology of
embodiment’s
integration of the corporeal experience of social agents. This project
began
with my PhD work among White, urban, working-class Australians at the
height of
deindustrialisation in the 1990s. The publications that came out of
this
research have explored such themes as contemporary family and kinship
practices, gender, relatedness, self, the integrated nature of the
gender order
and class structure, and the role of families in structuring
capitalism, the internalised structures of the gender order, and the embodiment of gender and sexuality. I have
concluded the Australian phase of my research with a monograph on
kinship and
gender that is being published by Ashgate.
I have recently
broadened the purview of this research to the Middle East
in order to add a comparative dimension to my work. This has led to a
thematic
issue of Social Analysis on sexuality in the Middle East.
3. The
sociobiological analysis of Incest Avoidance: This was the focus
of my MA work. I examined the evidence for the ontogenetic
“Westermarck effect”
(whereby proximity in early childhood between a boy and a girl causes
sexual
disinterest between them in adulthood), and the phylogenetic account for incest
avoidance as
an adaptation towards reduction in inbreeding. In addition to my MA
thesis, the
work has produced one paper and one critique.
Theory and epistemology: Common to all three
clusters is a concern with theory and epistemology
of social sciences. My general theoretical perspective
is rooted in contemporary theories of practice, and draws on
developments in
cognitive science and phenomenology. Relying
on this
theoretical perspective and on my empirical studies I have sought to contribute to broad
areas
of social research. For example, in a recent critique I argue that an
understanding of the social variation in subjectivity is a precondition
for a
sociological understanding of family practices; in a discussion of the
historiography
of the family I suggest some ways to analyse historical inertia
alongside
change; and, in a consideration of class and gender I attempt to
analyse
both as mutual constitutive processes by focusing on
‘style’.
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