One aspect of the classical view of stereotypes is the idea that social stereotypes exaggerate and homogenise traits held to be characteristic of particular categories and serve as blanket generalisations for all individuals assigned to such categories. The images and notions connected with them are then consensually shared in the interests of the social group among whom they are widely utilised and diffused. Such images and notions are usually held to be simplistic, rigid and erroneous, based on discriminatory values and damaging to people’s actual social and personal identities. In the classical view, stereotypes have been regarded as necessarily deficient. They distort the ways in which social groups or individuals are perceived, and they obscure the more complex and finite particularities and subjectivities tangled up in the everyday lives of groups and individuals. They are seen as deficient either because they encourage an indiscriminate lumping together of people under overarching group-signifiers, often of a derogatory character, or because they reduce specific groups and categories
to a limited set of conceptions which in themselves often contradict each other. Stereotypes are also discriminatory because the stunted features or attributes of others which characterise them are considered to form the basis for negative or hostile judgements, the rationale for exploitative, unjust treatment, or the justification for aggressive behaviour. In a word, stereotypes are bad. Politically, they stand in the way of more tolerant, even-handed and differentiated responses to people who belong to social or ethnic categories beyond those which are structurally dominant. Intellectually, they are poor devices for engaging in any form of social cartography, and for this reason should be eradicated from the map of good knowledge.

Excerpt from Stereotyping (Palgrave Macmillan)

Little scary Scottish children….shiver, never has tartan been so disturbing

Finally got round to scanning some of my artwork I produced whilst on a Fine Art degree.

Ah…can’t quite remember the reasoning behind much of the work now. But it had something to do with the paradox of marketing (and thus beatifying) something inherently ugly (i.e. frozen chicken), I think it was supposed to be an ultra-realistic representation of the process of promotion whilst simultaneously attempting to deconstruct that process. Or maybe I just got a kick out of painting six foot frozen chickens in oil.

The basic claim of the structuralist theorists was that a very wide range (perhaps all) of human activity, from economic interaction to literature, could be understood as being coded like language, bound by rules analogous to grammar and syntax….Its major weakness was its inability to provide any satisfactory theoretical account of historical or other development, which, however much part of the despised empirical universe, could not altogether be ignored. Consequently its intellectual standing was soon challenged by a much more theoretically powerful successor, Poststructuralism.

Excerpt from Postmodernism and History (Palgrave Macmillan)

The cognitive system and its representational structure or knowledge cannot be understood properly if they are treated in isolation from the environment or as a static system. Rather they have to be seen as a part of a circular feedback process: the generated behavioural output influences – mediated by environmental structures – parts of the sensory input. The sensory input influences – mediated by the non-linear representation system – the motor output. Abstractly speaking, two feedback loops are involved, each interacting with the other and trying to achieve a state of equilibrium or homeostasis. From a biological perspective, the internal loop is responsible for keeping the cognitive system alive and coupled to the environmental dynamics in a stable manner via the external loop. Epistemologically speaking, this process can be interpreted as trying to achieve an epistemological equilibrium between the internal knowledge structures (embodying behavioural strategies) and external environmental constraints and perturbations (Maturana and Varela, 1980).

An excerpt from Organising Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan)