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The 'problems' and 'solutions' of modern education are overwhelmingly produced and tailored by the modern episteme, institutions, truths, and powers of the Global North. To find new ways of thinking and doing sociology, this paper will explore the outlines of a new Global Sociology of Education Imagination (GSEI) inspired by pre-modern epistemes selected precisely because of their distance from modern European standpoints: the ancient lost matriarchal societies and commons-based societies organised around shared goods in pre-modern Europe. Using Foucault's archaeological methodology, this paper finds inspiration in these epistemes to outline a new GSEI capable of questioning certain tenets of the modern sociological episteme regarding science, knowledge, truth and its order, roles, voices, commitments, and 'places'. It concludes with an invitation to experiment with a new GSEI inspired by these pre-modern epistemes, as a tool to openly challenge modern (education) domination and make it intolerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial discusses the sociological perspective of innovation, starting with a critical overview of the situation of sociology in current innovation studies. An outline of several key challenges to understanding innovation in society is followed by an interpretation of the characteristics of a sociology of innovation based on the core assumptions of the discipline. The editorial concludes with a summary of the papers of the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging technologies research often covers various perspectives in disciplines and research areas ranging from hard sciences, engineering, policymaking, and sociology. However, the interrelationship between these different disciplinary domains, particularly the physical and social sciences, often occurs many years after a technology has matured and moved towards commercialization. Synthetic biology may serve an exception to this idea, where, since 2000, the physical and the social sciences communities have increasingly framed their research in response to various perspectives in biological engineering, risk assessment needs, governance challenges, and the social implications that the technology may incur. This paper reviews a broad collection of synthetic biology literature from 2000-2016, and demonstrates how the co-development of physical and social science communities has grown throughout synthetic biology's earliest stages of development. Further, this paper indicates that future co-development of synthetic biology scholarship will assist with significant challenges of the technology's risk assessment, governance, and public engagement needs, where an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to foster sustainable, risk-informed, and societally beneficial technological advances moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 15 semi-structured interviews with UK-based early/mid-career academics, this paper offers an empirically informed assessment of how lecturers teaching/researching the sociology of sport are managing their careers in a changing higher education landscape. Those interviewed were involved in the delivery of sociological content to a range of sports-themed courses with the interviews focusing on the changing fashions in studying sport (including a rapid increase in enrolment on certain sports-themed courses), and on the nature of the relationships with colleagues working in the same area (i.e. sport), but who teach/research it from a different discipline. The paper draws upon the processes of individualisation which lay at the root of reflexive modernisation to better understand the lived experiences of those interviewed. Using the metaphors of tribes, doors and boundaries, I assess the extent to which those interviewed felt there were opportunities for an interdisciplinary pedagogic approach to ‘sport’. The paper explores the relationship between the sociology of sport and its parent discipline (i.e. sociology) and where it might feature in a future (post-disciplinary?) landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Experimental designs to examine attitudes and behavior are crucial to make causal inferences. However, studies that assess attitudes and behavior of journalists are still dominated by correlational designs, such as used in surveys with journalists. Elaborating on historical and practical reasons for that, we argue in this paper why journalism scholars may benefit from including a certain experimental approach to their toolbox: the factorial survey experiment. Using data from a factorial survey with German newspaper journalists, we illustrate the application of factorial surveys from their conceptualization to the data analysis. Suggestions for further fields of application are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revives the debate as to whether Marxism is compatible with a commitment to human rights, but, in presenting a defence of such a compatibility, seeks to extend that debate beyond the confines of philosophical analysis to incorporate the contributions of Marxist theory to the sociology of human rights. It suggests that Marxist theory enables us to re-evaluate the priorities of human rights as a political project, and that in doing so it complements the social constructionist approach prevalent within the sociology of human rights. Taken together, a Marxist theory of social structure and a social constructionist theory of human rights enable a fuller realisation of the possibility of an emancipatory politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1953, when Anthony Thwaite described Geoffrey Hill as a ‘runic visionary’ in the Oxford student magazineThe Isis, the visionary has been a site of contestation for Hill and his critics. Tom Paulin's 1992 essay on Hill, ‘A Visionary Nationalist’, identified vision with an entrenched belief in ‘the magical transcendence of art’. While Paulin seems to have overlooked the fact that Hill's early poems subject this very belief to intense scrutiny, it can sometimes appear that their dense, hermetic forms are merely the despairing flip side of the transcendence they rebuke. In this paper, I suggest some ways to read the prosodic and thematic disposition of the mythical elements in Hill's early poetry, arguing that they constitute a complex, differential attitude towards the temporality of visionary thought. My argument draws on the notion of the speculative proposition as expounded by Gillian Rose, to explore how Hill inhabits the gulf between art's vision and the world of commerce and society. Through close readings of ‘Doctor Faustus’ and ‘Of Commerce and Society’, as well as Hill's early essay ‘The Poetry of Allen Tate’, the paper suggests that Hill's early poetry works towards an apprehension of society as productive content rather than repressed other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is the first article in English of Rosenstock-Huessy'sFull Count of the Times, the second volume of hisSociology. The vastness and diversity of Rosenstock-Huessy's corpus, plus the associative manner of his writing, makes any systematic analysis of his work very difficult. Yet he explicitly stated in his Sociology that he did have a system. In this paper I clarify why his work is devoted to theFull Count of the Times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Relying on a review of recent literature (and, sometimes, older publications), this paper attempts to highlight issues relating to the ‘spatial turn’ in religious studies. It outlines a series of developments in the study of religions related to issues in space, location and territory that have been enhanced by the intellectual framework of globalism and the empirical context of globalization. The challenges of such a geographic focus on religions are epistemological, theoretical and methodological. An examination of new and not-so-new issues in geographic approaches to religion shows how topical the perspective is, and how necessary it is to think the geography of religion beyond the boundaries of geography. In what ways do these new regimes of territoriality, these new concepts of religious space, and these new methods to understand the changes of material and cultural expressions of religion, whether wide-scale or local, partake on a paradigmatic shift? And how promising is it? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I present and summarize the theoretical proposals of four leading scholars of the so-called ‘relational sociology’. First of all I try to contextualize its emergence and developments in the increasingly globalized scientific system. From this particular (and international) point of view, relational sociology seems to develop through a peculiar scientific path opened and charted by well-identified actors and competitors, their invisible colleges, their global connections, cleavages, and coalitions. Whatever the structuring of this field, it accomplishes the criticism of classical individualistic and collectivistic sociological theories, a task strongly facilitated by the development of new methods and techniques of empirical research, and by the increasingly powerful computing capabilities. After this brief historical reconstruction, and following very strictly the contributions of the four scholars, I try to synthetize their theoretical designs, focusing the analysis on two scientific issues of great significance for the future of relational sociology: the specific ontology of ‘social relations’ and the methodologies used to observe it adequately. Finally, I wonder if we are facing a new sociological paradigm, already well structured and internationally established, or rather a ‘relational turn’ that probably will develop into a new ‘sociological field’ internally very differentiated and articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]