Terrell Carver | |
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| Born | Terrell Foster Carver September 4, 1946 |
| Alma mater | Columbia University, Oxford University |
| Occupation | Professor of Political Theory |
Terrell Foster Carver (born 4 September 1946) is a political theorist and academic.
Terrell Carver | |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | Terrell Foster Carver September 4, 1946 |
| Alma mater | Columbia University, Oxford University |
| Occupation | Professor of Political Theory |
Terrell Foster Carver (born 4 September 1946) is a political theorist and academic.
Carver was born in Boise, Idaho, in 1946, and grew up there, graduating from Boise High School in 1964. After receiving his B.A. summa cum laude in Government and History from Columbia University in 1968, Carver was awarded Columbia’s Kellett Fellowship for graduate study in England. [1]
After finishing his BPhil (1970) and DPhil (1975) at Balliol College of Oxford University, he pursued an academic career, becoming a lecturer at the University of Liverpool in 1974. In 1980, Carver moved to the University of Bristol where in 1995 he was appointed Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Politics (later School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies). [2] Carver became a naturalised British citizen in 2013.
At Bristol, Carver organised and taught various undergraduate and postgraduate modules, including Contemporary Feminist Thought, Postmodern Political Theory, and Gender, Masculinities and International Relations, as well as methodological seminars in Discourse and Visual Analysis and supervisions and examinations for numerous PhD students. [3] He served as Head of the Politics Department 1999-2004 and was also active 1987-2007 in an administrative role in the University’s Study Abroad Programme for exchanges and student recruitment. [4]
Alongside his teaching, Carver has contributed substantially to various fields of research, including Marx, Engels and Marxism; philosophy of social science, post-structuralism and feminist theory; and sex, gender and sexuality studies, notably men’s and masculinity studies; contributing numerous articles to standard works of reference. His study Men in Political Theory (2004) remains unique. [5] Besides doing his own translations of Marx’s Later Political Writings (1996) for Cambridge University Press, Carver investigated the exact roles played by Engels in the composition of the Marxian canon and in the interpretative tradition that now surrounds it. [6] Analogous to Derrida, Carver made novel contributions to scholarship on Marx as a historical figure existing "in the plural" (p. 103). [7] Key works in this field include Marx's Social Theory (1982); Marx and Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (1983); The Postmodern Marx (1999); and Engels: A Very Short Introduction (1981, repr. 2003). In addition, Carver has offered commentary on the presence of Marxisms in non-academic arenas, analysing Grimes' relationship with The Communist Manifesto, [8] and the fictionalisations of Engels. [9] Carver also served for a term on the Redaktionskommission for the Marx-Engels-Gesamtusgabe headquartered in Berlin where he figured in the controversies of the 1990s concerning Engels’s role as editor of the three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital. [10]
Carver has gained academic notoriety for his employment of feminist and men's studies perspectives on masculinities, contributing to political theory and International Relations. [11] Most notably, his works in the field include Gender is not a Synonym for Women (1996), and Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics (2008, co-authored with Samuel A. Chambers). Much of Carver’s theorisations on gender, sex and sexuality are influenced by the work of post-structural feminist thinkers, such as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Stevi Jackson. [12] In navigating their discursive readings of gender, Carver critically analyses the masculinist, universalising narratives that construct and maintain the oppression of women. His 2022 book Masculinities, Gender and International Relations (co-authored with Laura Lyddon) turns this ‘gender lens’ onto the international politics of the legitimate arms trade and weapons manufacturing. [13] In turn, Carver’s contributions to gender, sex and sexuality studies have influenced notable feminist scholars, including Cynthia Enloe, Laura Shepherd, Catherine Eschle, and Sarah Childs.
Carver’s research works have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. [14]
Carver is the co-general editor of three book series: 'Routledge Innovators in Political Theory' (with Samuel A. Chambers), 'Globalization' for Rowman & Littlefield (with Manfred B. Steger), and 'Marx, Engels, and Marxisms' for Palgrave Macmillan (with Marcello Musto). He has been co-editor-in-chief of the journal Contemporary Political Theory (with Samuel A. Chambers) since 2010. [15]
Carver was a long-serving member of the Executive Committee of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom (PSA), during which time he created and managed an extensive program of exchange relationships with other national and international associations in political science. As a result, nearly 500 individuals received grants and aid, furthering the internationalisation of the profession and focusing on early career scholars and the Global South. He was also elected for two terms on the Executive Committee of the International Political Science Association (IPSA), serving as Vice-President for Europe, and was appointed Program Co-Chair for the World Congress in Brisbane in 2018. [16] He was also President’s special nominee on the governing Council in 2023. He has served as Consulting Editor for the journal Political Theory and is an active member of the editorial boards for New Political Science, International Feminist Journal of Politics and International Political Science Review. [17]
In 2015, Carver was honoured, within the American Political Science Association, with the Charles A. McCoy Career Achievement Award, recognising him as a progressive political scientist who has had a long, successful career as an academic in teaching and service. [18]
Carver has been a visiting professor or associated fellow at numerous academic institutions, including Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges, Senshu University, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, and Fudan University. He has taught regularly for the International Political Science Association ‘Methods School’ at the National University of Singapore. [19] In addition, Carver has been appointed affiliated professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Peking University, and Nanjing University.
Carver navigates the complexity of the Marx-Engels relationship by disputing the three main biographical framings for it: that the two were always in agreement; that in considering Marx, Engels can be ignored; and that Marx, accepted all of Engels’s views. Contrary to this reception, Carver reveals how Marx can by no means be assumed to have shared Engels's views on natural and social history, or on dialectics as a scientific method. [20]
Carver makes sense of the tensions within Marxist thought over who Marx was and what he said, arguing that ‘there have always been multiple Marx’s, and each one is a product of a reading strategy’ (p. 234). According to Brown (1998), Carver offers a unique reading of Marx’s language and the language around Marx, from which 'Carver offers an alternative picture to readers as to who Marx is and why they might be interest in him' (p. 291). [21] As a result, Carver offers a thematically and textually driven way to read Marx outside the conventional biographical and ideological framings. [22]
Carver asks the reader to imagine Engels’s motivations and intent in his earliest works, long undervalued and dismissed as juvenilia, without teleological reference to his subsequent association with Marx. [23] . According to Strauss (2020), Carver does an 'immense service' (np) to the literature on Engels and Marx, revealing that the young Engels was ‘highly imaginative, projecting himself into other worlds via historical narrative and fictional writing, both prose and poetry’ (p. 7). [24]
Carver reprises and enhances the feminist critique of ‘masculine violence, domination, and privilege’ (p. 4), arguing that men, unlike women, can appear as universally ‘human’ in a supposedly de-gendered way, but also as gendered male and masculine in a moralising ‘good’ way. By turning to Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Carver demonstrates that as a proto-feminist Engels fails to examine men critically as ‘the agents of domination’ (p. 40), thereby reproducing the oppression of women. [25] For this, Carver has received widespread notoriety for redressesing major erroneous assumptions within feminist thought that has led to an underdevelopment of the gendered perspective of men. [26]
Carver and Chambers argue that the trope of ‘troubling’, from Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990, repr. 1999), can serve as a guide to grasping Butler’s theorisations of gender, sex and sexuality, and also as a guide to Butler’s contributions to contemporary political theory. [27] Carver and Chambers interrogate the ways that Butler makes philosophical trouble into political trouble, and what effects this troubling has had on feminist and queer politics, and on public policies. By bringing Butler into perspective as a political thinker, Carver and Chambers foreground Butler as a political theorist and show that Butler's work is central and canonical to political theory. [28]
Carver and Lyddon conceptualise gender as a hierarchy of men over women, and of some men over others, the latter in ‘nested hierarchies’ of domination and subordination through which the oppression of women is secured. Thus, they align the global hierarchies of wealthy nation-states with the global hierarchies of military power, and with the global hierarchy of weapons production in national corporations – all of which are overwhelmingly male-dominated. Analytically they show how elite men are able to ‘get away with it’. [29] As a result, this book has been noted as an 'insightful reflection on the relationship between gender, masculinities, and IR, both for IR scholars and international security practitioners' (Worth, 2022: p. 220). [30]
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern societies are patriarchal—they prioritize the male point of view—and that women are treated unjustly in these societies. Efforts to change this include fighting against gender stereotypes and improving educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women.
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.
Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory.
Social philosophy examines questions about the foundations of social institutions, behavior, power structures, and interpretations of society in terms of ethical values rather than empirical relations. Social philosophers emphasize understanding the social contexts for political, legal, moral and cultural questions, and the development of novel theoretical frameworks, from social ontology to care ethics to cosmopolitan theories of democracy, natural law, human rights, gender equity and global justice.
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist politics in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and sociology, communication, media studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, home economics, literature, education, and philosophy.
Performativity is the concept that language can function as a form of social action and have the effect of change. The concept has multiple applications in diverse fields such as anthropology, social and cultural geography, economics, gender studies, law, linguistics, performance studies, history, management studies and philosophy.
Postmodern feminism is a mix of postmodernism and French feminism that rejects a universal female subject. The goal of postmodern feminism is to destabilize the patriarchal norms entrenched in society that have led to gender inequality. Postmodern feminists seek to accomplish this goal through opposing essentialism, philosophy, and universal truths in favor of embracing the differences that exist amongst women in order to demonstrate that not all women are the same. These ideologies are rejected by postmodern feminists because they believe if a universal truth is applied to all women of society, it minimizes individual experience, hence they warn women to be aware of ideas displayed as the norm in society since it may stem from masculine notions of how women should be portrayed.
Men's studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning men, masculinity, gender, culture, politics and sexuality. It academically examines what it means to be a man in contemporary society.
Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality.
Feminism is a broad term given to works of those scholars who have sought to bring gender concerns into the academic study of international politics and who have used feminist theory and sometimes queer theory to better understand global politics and international relations as a whole.
Gender essentialism is a theory which attributes distinct, intrinsic qualities to women and men. Based in essentialism, it holds that there are certain universal, innate, biologically based features of gender that are at the root of many of the group differences observed in the behavior of men and women.
A variety of movements of feminist ideology have developed over the years. They vary in goals, strategies, and affiliations. They often overlap, and some feminists identify themselves with several branches of feminist thought.
Feminist political theory is an area of philosophy that focuses on understanding and critiquing the way political philosophy is usually construed and on articulating how political theory might be reconstructed in a way that advances feminist concerns. Feminist political theory combines aspects of both feminist theory and political theory in order to take a feminist approach to traditional questions within political philosophy.
The social construction of gender is a theory in the humanities and social sciences about the manifestation of cultural origins, mechanisms, and corollaries of gender perception and expression in the context of interpersonal and group social interaction. Specifically, the social construction of gender theory stipulates that gender roles are an achieved "status" in a social environment, which implicitly and explicitly categorize people and therefore motivate social behaviors.
Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.
Feminist security studies is a subdiscipline of security studies that draws attention to gendered dimensions of security.
Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory is a book by the sociologist Lise Vogel that is considered an important contribution to Marxist Feminism. Vogel surveys Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's comments on the causes of women's oppression, examines how socialist movements in Europe and in the United States have addressed women's oppression, and argues that women's oppression should be understood in terms of women's role in social reproduction and in particular in reproducing labor power.
Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience, especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.
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Antke Engel is a German philosopher and publicist. Together with Sabine Hark, she is one of the pioneers of Butler reception in Germany, teaches as a visiting professor for Queer Studies at various universities and is the founder and director of the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin.
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