Political Science Speaker Series Lecture
Kevin McMillan, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa

How do ideas and other cultural phenomena shape human action? In IR and the social sciences, the phenomenon of “reflexivity” has supplied one increasingly popular way to characterise the kinds of effects that cultural phenomena produce in the social world. This talk examines the logic of select social-scientific accounts that have highlighted reflexive dynamics, identifying some latent assumptions that these approaches share about what it would mean for cultural phenomena to influence the “real world”, and what forms this influence must take. It then tries to sketch an alternative conception of reflexivity that is more faithful to the rich and fundamental relationship between ideas and action.
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