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This paper contributes to the social theoretical foundations of a sociology of media and communication by making use of the cultural–historical school in psychology. Such perspective gains relevance in digital capitalism and the blurring of production and Internet usage. The paper first revisits Habermas's influential notion of communicative action and agency. Second, it uses activity theory as an alternative, more promising way of theorising because it links communication closer to work. A model of communicative action is introduced and a conceptual link between media and human tool use is established. Third, the paper elaborates on the notion of activity in the digital world and posits that digitalisation can be understood as a 'machinisation' of mental and communicative-coordinative work. The developed perspective, the paper concludes, allows critical media and communication sociology to operate with meaningful concepts of communicative expropriation, exploitation and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that the Zionist policies implemented by Israel had and continue to have a grave impact not only on the Palestinians in historic Palestine alone but also follows them in the diaspora, where some Palestinians have taken refuge. This article argues that Israel's apartheid regime, exposed by various international Human Rights Organizations, is not a recent discovery. Apartheid, the exclusion of the natives, and their racialization have accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception. Crucial questions raised in this paper include how Palestine and the Palestinians are conceived by Zionism, in and outside of Israel, and how they are perceived by the West, especially within the Canadian context. This paper pays special attention to comparing the experience of Palestinians with that of North America's Indigenous population, specifically concerning Israel's and Canada's colonial policies towards the Indigenous peoples. It also discusses the impact of Israel's policies of silencing and vilification that doggedly follow Palestinians into the diaspora: vilifications and silencing enacted by the Israel lobby through its various Zionist (Jewish) branches, whose primary role is to silence and vilify the Palestinians and curb criticism of Israel and Zionism. This policy, it is argued, is strongly supported by Canada, structurally, institutionally and through media propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-established in the literature on the economic dimensions of US college sport that it has become a site of professionalized, value-producing work that does not equitably compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for the production of value therein. Yet, while these interventions make highly compelling political economic claims, few focus on how college athletes themselves experience the system and thus the exploitation they might endure. Drawing on testimony from semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 former college football players, we aim to expand discussions of exploitation beyond debates over compensation through our analysis of the contrast between 'work' and 'play' that exists in the lives of campus athletic workers. Utilizing a non-deterministic Marxian theory of exploitation, this paper explicitly interrogates the way capitalist ideology permeates college football by centering the important tension between 'work' and 'play' that contributes to that ideology as experienced and understood by college football players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical theory has already marked that technology often threatens civil liberties, personal autonomy, and rights. Heidegger, later Marcuse, emphasized how technology is not value-free in its own revealing power of the surrounding environment, external and inner nature. Throughout this paper, I explore how the aesthetic approach engages with critical theory and contributes to the sociology of media and communication. For this, I will theoretically survey the terms of sociality under the forces of immediate communication, ubiquitous surveillance, and the compression of time and space that Baudrillard and Virilio once problematized through the lens of critical technology theory to adapt it to media and communication studies. I contend that techno-aesthetics that converge with Rancière's dissensus can provide practical suggestions on an updated vocation of critical sociology. This article discusses the potential of aesthetic and social criticism of media for democratizing technology that Feenberg inserted. It is urgent to acknowledge the changing spatio-temporal aesthetic regimes that affect the societal imagination and limits of sociality and action to determine the next steps for achieving a commons-based society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology is one of the major disciplines to foster understanding and protection of the livelihoods of local people. For instance, the discipline can describe the linkage between the environment and people and the effects of environmental change on local groups of people in a Delta country such as Bangladesh. However, the imperial philosophy of modernity that dominates the discipline and which is evident in the Sociology department at the University of Dhaka (UofD) underscores a considerable distance between academic conceptualizations of local perspectives on issues such as climatic change and the actual views of the local people of Bangladesh. Grounded on this assertion, this paper explores a question: What are the challenges for Sociology to represent Delta people and protect their social justice? The paper depends on the content analysis of sociological practices at UofD: imperial modernity and climatic adaptation. The findings of the paper argue that Sociology has been failing to represent the local meanings of climatic change due to the domination of imperial conceptualizations of modernity. Climate finance conceptualized by a Western perspective, and Sociology, as a discipline, fails to represent locally contextualized meanings related to climate finance; thus, the marginalized groups of people are increasingly facing survival challenges responsible for climate apartheid. Only a decolonized Sociology can challenge this imperial domination and play an effective role in reducing the discipline's gap of understanding of the local people and in promoting social justice in Delta Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the first ethnographic account of Foxconn in Zhengzhou—the world's largest iPhone manufacturing base—this paper argues that a new labor regime features 'hegemonic precarity' has arisen since capital's move to inland China. Despite being offered formal contracts with long-term benefits, inland Foxconn workers choose a more precarious employment status. I argue that this surprising pattern is a result of the interaction between dynamics at the point of production and that of social reproduction. Through the mechanism of 'hoarding of time', Foxconn's management pays relatively high wages to a minority of workers while keeping the majority's wages minimal. Meanwhile, changing dynamics in the realm of social reproduction makes Foxconn workers, especially women with children, constantly struggle between work and the family. Working together, these factors have led to extremely high turnover rates, bleak prospects for labor solidarity, and the rise of 'gig manufacturing' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how working-class activists challenged and overcame political fear narratives during the anti-water charges campaign in Ireland (2014–2016), with specific focus on the ‘sinister’ narrative, an attempt by the government and its supporters to frame working-class protestors as violent, irrational and extremist. Rather than subscribing to the position that political fear is ubiquitous or the reflection of a general societal malaise, this paper follows Jeffries’ argument that political fear is mediated, contested and contradicted. While political fear operates most effectively when targeting expectations for normal living, it is these same expectations that offer fertile ground for opposing fear threats. Drawing on interviews from activists, this paper shows how the ‘normal living’ becomes a key context in which ‘deviance framing’ around class and gender can be reappropriated/reframed by activists, particularly through the deployment of counter spectacles and through the reframing of what constitutes legitimate emotional responses to government-initiated fear threats. Finally, while political fear can have an individualising effect, this paper demonstrates how subjective and individual acts of transgression are mediated through a collective and community lens as the crucial element in overcoming political fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Settler colonial projects erase Indigenous peoples and their histories to justify expropriation of sovereign land. Educational curriculum plays a central role in settler colonialism by denying both long-standing connections to the land and dehumanizing those on it, relegating them to objects to be controlled or assimilated by colonizers, positioned as the colonized land's rightful owners. This has long been the case for Palestinians. Violent expulsion from their land began with the settler colonial Zionist project in the late-19th century, a time of global colonization, and continues into the present, alongside the denial of Palestinian subjectivity and 'permission to narrate' their own history in public, political, and academic discourses. This paper examining US-based college-level introductory sociology textbooks finds that they replicate and perpetuate colonial narratives through Orientalist ascriptions and Palestinian de-Indigenization, while eliding the settler colonial and apartheid conditions under which they live, thereby contributing to the settler project themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces Palestinian women's political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists' analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that race must be a central consideration in understanding migration in Korea, where international migrants are rapidly reshaping the national landscape. While migration scholarship on Korea has analyzed various policy trajectories, it has predominantly focused on three aspects—liberal democracy, ethnicity, and gender—largely overlooking the significance of race. First, it assumes that liberal democracy will eventually supersede xenophobia without critically examining its assumptions that are both racialized and teleological in nature. Second, by prioritizing ethnicity, it interprets discrimination against migrants through the notion of uni-ethnicity and a fear of foreignness without delving into Korea’s deeply rooted fixation on race. Third, it overemphasizes gendered migration, regarding Korea’s demographic crisis as a primary reason for accepting migrant women as biological reproducers. This paper contends that all three aspects are intricately connected to race, including Korea’s aspiration for whiteness and abjection of blackness, which significantly shape migration dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilises the concepts of social exclusion and precarity to explore the situation of migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on European countries, we first demonstrate how migrants were more likely to experience exclusion prior to the crisis and how they were further marginalised due to the public health measures. Second, we show how inadequate government support exacerbated the exclusion of migrants. Finally, we explore social ties of migrants during the pandemic, with a focus on local and transnational ties. The paper is based on qualitative data collected as part of the European Union (EU)-funded project RESISTIRÉ, which examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable groups across Europe. Over 100 narratives with migrants were gathered during the project, and these were analysed to explore the multiple social exclusions experienced by migrants, as well as the ways they coped with being on the margins of receiving societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worker misclassification is a form of precarious employment in which employers illegally designate their employees as 'independent contractors' to cut labor costs. Non-standard employment arrangements and the emergence of the misclassification problem are expressions of neoliberal economic reform and attendant shifts in managerial strategy. Although scholars and government statisticians have documented the prevalence of worker misclassification, extant research on labor-organizing campaigns in response to this practice is lacking. This paper presents case studies of two successful organizing campaigns against worker misclassification: (1) a United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBCJA) effort in the Northeastern construction industry and (2) a Teamsters campaign focused on the West Coast port trucking industry. Both campaigns employ similar frames highlighting competition, free markets, and the necessity of industrial change to achieve these ideals. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects and limitations of these organizing strategies given the countervailing political and economic headwinds posed by neoliberal restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of partisanship, rightwing media, and social media on attitudes about contemporary conspiracy theories. Mainstream scholarly views that 'both sides' of the political aisle indulge routinely in such theories are challenged. I adopt a Gramscian hegemonic framework that examines rising rightwing conspiracy theories as a manifestation of mass false consciousness in service of a political-economic system that serves upper-class interests. Issues examined include the QAnon movement, 'big lie' voter fraud conspiracism, and Covid-19 conspiracy theories, and the way they related to partisanship, rightwing media, and social media. I provide evidence that Republican partisanship, rightwing media consumption, and social media consumption are all significant statistical predictors of acceptance of modern conspiracy theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses Trump's failed self-coup, its authoritarian backwash, and threats to democracy. It analyzes his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which contributed to his 2020 election loss and deepened the political polarization that led to the January 6 Capitol insurrection. The essay also discusses how the forty-year acceleration of economic inequality and sociopolitical de-democratization generated a legitimacy crisis of the hegemonic, neoliberal regime that opened way for Trumpist ethnoracial nationalism. The Trump presidency and pandemic increased the intensity of the political-economic contradictions and transparency of the attenuated relationship of democracy and capitalism. In the consequent "interregnum," fundamental threats to democratic electoral institutions persist, yet a clear, realistic vision of an alternative democratic regime and the political bloc to bring it into being have yet to be forged. The fate of American democracy rides on overcoming the remarkable denial and normalization of the Trump coup attempt and on forging new safeguards for electoral institutions. Preventing a recurrence, however, requires a progressive transformation of Trumpism's de-democratized seedbed – neoliberal capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2024, Florida’s Board of Education eliminated the sociology course, ‘Principles of Sociology’ as one of its core requirements for obtaining a general social science education in its college and university system. Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz, led the charge, claiming that sociology has been ‘hijacked by left wing activists’ and is a purveyor of ‘woke ideology’. Some within the profession would agree with Diaz, and certainly, many university administrators would as well. Of course, there are varying representations of sociology, and what Diaz and others are targeting is critical sociology and its commitment to the interrogation of power. However, these political dynamics are not new. The history of critical sociology has reflected a similar pattern that it is being played out currently. The ebbs and flows of critical sociology’s place within the discipline, the state and profession’s suppression of it, its resurgence linked to external social and political forces, and its precarious existence within the university have been true of critical sociology since its origins. This paper offers a historical context for better understanding the current attack on the field of sociology and raises the question, what should critical sociologists do about it? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of pandemic governance on state regimes is a topic of lively debate. While some researchers suggest that governments may use a ‘state of exception’ to consolidate their power and introduce new methods of control, others see it as an opportunity for new civil society initiatives and social innovation. In this paper, we examine both the actions and discourses of the Polish government and its associated actors and the independent bottom-up responses of Polish society and how these were incorporated or rejected by the government. Our primary focus is on public health governance, including quarantine policies, the management of scarce personal protective equipment, related narratives and societal responses. This study is based primarily on desk research, analysis of key legislation and regulations tailored to the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and analysis of social media (X/Twitter) discourse related to COVID-19. Our research reveals a crisis not only of governance but primarily of the neoliberal capitalist state. We conclude that governance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland showed uneven patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of antisemitism in relation to the construction of national identity in late capitalist and post-Nazi societies. Its argument centres on the concept of 'secondary antisemitism', as developed within the Critical Theory tradition. Thus, I will elaborate on the complex relationships between post-Nazi antisemitism, the culture industry and the radical destruction of memory in late capitalist societies. The aim is to show the contemporary relevance of secondary antisemitism beyond the immediate context of the task of remembering the Nazi past. In the second section of this paper I will illustrate this by an analysis of examples from print media debates in Austria on the recent financial crisis and show that instances of secondary antisemitism are utilized for the discursive construction of an exclusive national(ist) unity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on an anti-austerity and anti-racist urban movement, emerging from the multiethnic precariat in Sweden's most disadvantaged metropolitan areas. It has catalysed the reinvention of a common space with roots in the labour movement of the late 19th century, The People' House, a meme for contemporary community centres, loaded with hopes of contesting racial stigma and structurally conditioned precarity of citizenship and labour. Scrutinising a specific case, the authors address the ambiguous emplacement of a People's House in a Stockholm wrought by financialisation, polarising processes of segregation, the commodification of welfare institutions and interventions by competing NGO coalitions in a post-political age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special issue contributes to the exploration of transversal solidarities counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand and a xenophobic populism on the other. It tracks contours of a multifarious countermovement, traversing 'race', class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the common and the renewal of democracy. The emphasis is on the understanding of contending urban justice movements, welcoming communities and their liaisons in a multiscale (local, national, transnational) perspective. A collection of theoretically informed papers discusses cases from urban contexts of Europe and the United States, all riveted by schisms of class, 'race'/ethnicity and gender, occupied by the 'migration' issue and challenged by contending movements for social cum environmental sustainability. Exploring examples of social movements and forms of mobilisation in different contexts, the overarching aim is to retrieve options for transversal solidarities transcending identities while focusing on commonalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on debt highlights its use as a tool for investment and a substitute for public welfare programs. Use of debt, however, is not equal across social groups. Black households in particular have lower debt levels than white households. In this paper, we explore the context behind massive racial disparities in household debt. Conceptually, we propose that personal debt is an indicator of integration in the financial system. As such, we argue that black households' lower debt levels can be understood as financial isolation rather than financial health. We support this argument by using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances to estimate racial differences in access to financial tools net of racial differences in socioeconomic status, asset levels, and financial literacy. We also show that black households' financial information networks are different from white households' in ways that suggest restricted access to formal financial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to reconstruct the debate over the pandemic in Italy to highlight the logic of the discourse that guided the various voices. The two governmentalities that have monopolized the public and political debate are biomedical and economic. The former brought the defense of biological life (zoé) as the ultimate element of truth and legitimacy of the government's action. The latter, based the "true" justification upon a careful cost–benefit calculation and the protection of the interests of homo oeconomicus. The debate lacked a "social" perspective capable of placing dignity and human rights as a compass for intervention. What has been lost by limiting the question to a choice between defending bare life or defending economic interests? Behind an apparent impartial universalism that would drive both biomedical and economic logic, there emerges a form of discrimination and lack of protection for specific sectors of society, in particular the marginal ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The precarity and violation that has resulted from decades of neoliberal reforms have been made clear in the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in terms of access to healthcare and financial inequality. However, ideological discourses of individual heroics have been rapidly deployed, to patch up the damage done to neoliberal rhetoric. In this paper, we argue a critical sociological lens reveals something important about this violence of neoliberalism at this moment during the crisis. Analysing media articles that have considerable reach, availability and shareability, we interrogate the rhetorical framing of frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and uncover three significant themes: 'celebrating "our" heroes', 'personal sacrifice' and 'the heroes of war'. We argue that the emerging field of the sociology of violence provides the means to expose the violence of neoliberalism in the current COVID-19 pandemic as well as identify the discursive apparatus that obscure the violation of neoliberalism more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on migration, language and employment is dominated by the human capital approach and promotes multilingualism as a universal good. This paper examines the relationship between language and work for migrants illustrating how they are ascribed value as capital according to their position and the "language part of work." First, we trace a genealogy of the migration regime in relation to the labor and linguistic market of migrants in Turkey, characterized by informality and exploitation. Then, we look at the experiences of refugees qualitatively to show how language is differentially valued and has modest effects on social mobility. We argue that language learning instead of stemming from individuals' possession of capital should be examined within a broader linguistic and employment framework. This research goes beyond conventional wisdom about the centrality of language as a means to improve employment by shedding light on the structure that shapes language value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Burakumin (部落民), the largest minority in Japan, are a (re)construction of the modern period, much like race and ethnicity. Since Japan's modernization, the Burakumin have been discriminated against in various ways; for example, young Burakumin have been driven to suicide due to discrimination in marriage and employment. The terms Buraku （部落） and Burakumin were established during Japan's period of modernization. They settled in the Japanese language by the early 1900s. Existing studies, however, locate Buraku discrimination as originating in feudalism, or as reflecting Japan's fixed system of society. Alternatively, Western researchers have attempted to understand Burakumin in relation to India's system of outcastes. Both approaches are wanting, since the existence of Burakumin has experienced repeated (re)construction and reconceptualizing. Non-Burakumin have been integrated into existing or formed new Buraku communities; for example, this paper explores the formation of four new Buraku in a city where the Japanese Naval Station required a huge supply of day laborers. I show that agreements to supply Burakumin laborers reflected the mobility of capital and bio-power, as defined by Michel Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the concepts of metabolism and metabolic rift as a framework, this paper examines carbon geoengineering technologies as a solution to climate change and explores if it is possible to mend an ecological metabolic rift without fundamental changes in the social metabolic order. Carbon geoengineering technologies have become a key component of scenarios to limit the extent of global warming and are being discussed as a means to sequester carbon and, therefore, mend the carbon cycle. However, most applications of carbon geoengineering thus far do not result in net negative emissions. Strategies to make operations profitable result in neutral or positive, rather than negative, emissions. While these strategies have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations, the current social order constrains their use and effectiveness. Instead of being applied as part of the solution to climate change, carbon geoengineering is being strategically promoted by the fossil fuel industry in ways that serve to reproduce and maintain the current social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though much research underscores the significance of social inequalities in illness, the health consequences of inequity tend to occupy a marginal position in medical education. Drawing on qualitative interviews with third and fourth year medical students, this paper explores how future doctors understand and would improve health in the United States. While participants with background in public health and policy understand that social inequalities shape health and access to care, many others emphasize individual behaviour and motivation as central to ill health. Emphasizing health behaviour aligns with biomedical understandings of disease, and also captures the hold of neoliberal values over ideas of health and illness. Focus on health behaviour also provides a means of ignoring the racist roots of enduring inequity that underlies much ill health. Making inequity more visible in medical education and practice necessitates recognizing the sway of neoliberal thought over common-sense ideas of health and illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative interviews and fieldwork, this paper examines the risk factors that lead families into mortgage default and foreclosure risk. While neoliberal ideology and policy recognize lower-income families as at greater risk, in this paper we argue that immigrants and women experience particular risks – separation and divorce, the expense of remittances, poorer treatment in rental markets, and conflicting experience of ownership between the United States and country of origin. When these differences are ignored, social policies cannot respond adequately to the disproportionate risk that women and immigrants face to homeownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws upon data from an ethnographic study of a UK call centre to investigate the claims of efficiency and productivity that underpin service occupations. Neoliberal ideology valorises competition, profitability and the free market, imperatives which filter down to organisational level and manifest as the pursuit of efficiency. The evidence in this paper highlights how the call centre's quest for efficiency is undermined by inefficiencies that are inherent in management implementation of work routines designed to maximise efficiency. While management practice and automated work routines may not be efficient, they do generate specific outcomes; the oppression, abuse and domination of employees both in relation to conditions of employment and working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-wage labour migration from lower- to higher-income economies has become a precondition for capital accumulation. As a part of this, neoliberal actors (businesses and states) strive to actively produce migrants with a strong work ethic. They do this in numerous ways. In this paper, we draw upon labour process theory to argue that a ‘mobility–immobility dynamic’ is a major way capital now controls precarious workers. The mobility–immobility dynamic relates to low-wage workers’ need to move (and often circulate) internationally but, once they have moved, a desire by businesses and states to keep them in place. The fixing of migrants both across space (through transnational mobility) and in place (through immobility) underlines the importance of a multi-scalar approach to understanding the control of the transnational working-class. We draw on evidence from European horticulture – 36 in-depth interviews with migrant workers, employers and community stakeholders in Norway and the United Kingdom – to highlight the mobility–immobility dynamic in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to read Stuart Hall from South Africa, in relation to South Africa, and with South Africa in mind? This paper engages 'what's left of the debate' between Marxism and postcolonialism as politico-theoretical projects by refusing the opposition of compartmentalized scholarly fields, and by positing a conjunctural postcolonial-postsocialist praxis necessary for interpreting contemporary South Africa (as elsewhere.) Drawing on Hall's notion of 'moments' as both spatial and temporal, and assembled in the work of representation, I draw together insights from three moments in Hall's work: his foundational essay for the apartheid predicament, 'Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance'; the collectively written Policing the Crisis and particularly its remarkable conclusion which speaks to the criminalization of poor people's struggles; and his later thoughts on 'the end of innocence' with respect to coalitional Black politics. Reflecting on aspects of my research on 20th-century Durban, I suggest why these three moments must be seen in relation to each other, as a constellation that points, through the legacies of the Black Radical Tradition, to as yet unnamed postcolonial-postsocialist Marxisms of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we read college course syllabi as material objects that shed light on larger issues, specifically conflict between faculty and students. We explore the commodification of ‘college labor’ where degreed labor and credit hours are produced. Under these conditions, the syllabus becomes a labor contract detailing faculty expectations of students. Rather than merely introducing the course subject matter or providing only basic information, the syllabus increasingly spells out the precise conditions under which student work will be evaluated and credit hours awarded, and the behavioral and attitudinal expectations of students. By observing how power is transacted through the syllabus, we better understand the role that faculty/student relations play in further undermining academic community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several decades, the distinction between ‘white-collar’ (non-manual) and ‘blue-collar’ (manual) work occupied a central place in the analysis of working-class consciousness. According to many scholars, the expansion of non-manual employment was key to dismantling traditional working-class identities. Although several analysts noted the irrelevance of the white-collar/blue-collar distinction as a determinant of class consciousness, the most recent research on class in Chile continues on the traditional argument. However, the empirical research supporting such a contention has been scarce. In this paper I test that hypothesis. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, I show that the distinction between manual and non-manual labor does not lead to significant variations in workers’ class consciousness. Therefore, its use in recent research on class (e.g. the contention that non-manual employment reinforces a ‘middle-class’ consciousness among workers) is deemed questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper completes an investigation into why there was no major social movement around the foreclosure crisis. The basis of this research was a community study that involved surveys of foreclosed people, community members, and activists, as well as participant observation of anti-foreclosure organizations. Initially I found that lack of membership in or contact with civic organizations on the part of those going through foreclosure was at the heart of the failure to form a movement. The present study adds to this finding by focusing on the groups attempting to organize around foreclosure. I argue that the absence of progressive organizations with organic social roots in the communities affected by foreclosure, lack of resources to make foreclosure a public issue, and failure to develop an ideology that could effectively frame this issue played additional parts in explaining this missing movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the crisis turns into long-term economic downturn, younger age-groups in Europe seem to be hit with higher levels of unemployment while the welfare state is steadily shrinking. The young have suddenly become a social group united by collective material interests, but does this translate into a sense of a collective political interest? The paper examines to what extent the dominant class-based social science of the post-war years can help us understand the politics of age-groups. The analysis highlights four changes since post-war years: the workplace has changed, impacting socialization; modern media has changed, impacting mobilization; the political landscape is fairly institutionalized, tempering the possibilities for new political concerns to find voice; and those who would define and articulate the political priorities of the young are leaving the Old Continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has positioned itself as a modernising country (re)built on the profits of its energy boom and the efforts of, currently, over four million labour migrants, the majority from Central Asia. Far too many migrants endure an extremely precarious everyday as they are forced to live in what this article describes as a citywide state of exception, within which legal frameworks protecting migrants are ignored or misinterpreted to the benefit of the market. Many migrants who desire ‘legality’ are forced into ‘illegality’ by their employers and landlords refusing to register their documents correctly, increasing their vulnerability. Such abuses are facilitated by the state construction of migrants as diseased and criminal, which in turn becomes embedded into cultural imaginations. Employing Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this paper theorises how these constructions position migrants as superfluous and that they can be ‘let to die’. The research demonstrates that migrants are simultaneously visible and invisible to the state; with the latter, the legal uncertainty denies migrants access to welfare and a voice within the city, but they are visible for exploitation both in terms of their labour and the political capital gained from their presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociological study of popular cinema provides an analytic entry point for exploring how economic realities are given meaning through cultural products. In this paper, I compare how two Hollywood movies about bike messengers, Quicksilver and Premium Rush, position their main characters in relationship to the new economy. Both films provide commentaries on work and social class, but, as products of unique socio-historical periods, I argue that their commentaries differ significantly. Produced in the 1980s, Quicksilver uses messengering as a form of middle-class redemption, allowing the protagonist to return to the world of capitalist finance. By contrast, as a product of the Great Recession, Premium Rush offers a utopian vision of self-determination for low-wage service workers at the same time that it reifies the uncertainty, unpredictability, and riskiness that increasingly characterize American labor. I also show that both films converge in their portrayal of women and working-class blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we lay bare the theoretical underpinnings for the pervasive individualist model that shapes many community engagement courses, and then we present and analyze a case study based on a collaborative community-based research model developed by the co-authors. By shifting the theoretical foundations for community-based research, and more specifically, grounding our work in feminist ethics and critical pedagogy theories, we created linked courses that weave both collaborative theory and practice into the fabric of the courses. Upon teaching these courses, we found that students responded in an overwhelmingly positive way to collaborative theoretical models and to collaborative dialogical practice in the classroom, but when it came to team-based work conducted with community members, student responses were mixed. Reactions to collaborative grading practice conducted by faculty members and the community partner were more unanimous: a majority of students expressed confusion and discomfort with this practice. Collaborative theory and dialogical practice, then, were uniformly embraced in the classroom, while team-based work and evaluation in the community provided more discomfort and displeasure. This finding reiterates the pervasiveness of individualist thinking, even when students have chosen courses that are expressly collaborative in both theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anarchism has not had a noticeable impact upon sociology. The two traditions diverged in their interest in society and their relationship to it. This paper contrasts the practitioners or thinkers of one tradition against the other. The analysis shows some strong antagonisms, many instances of close analysis and critique of each other’s perspectives, and a number of friendly and supportive relationships between anarchists and sociologists. Anarchists tended to admire the intellectual rigor of sociologists, but thought sociologists were insiders – mere reformers at best, reactionaries at worst – content to study society, but rarely to act for its improvement. Sociologists viewed anarchists with an even wider range of opinion, including considering them principled and admirable revolutionaries, slightly naïve utopians, or criminals and chaos-lovers bent on the destruction of social order. These factors contributed to the exclusion of anarchist ideas and anarchists themselves from the sociological canon. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though language and oral tradition have long been appreciated among the indigenous people of Africa as the vehicle of knowledge and central to societal development, social scientists and even sociologists have not utilized these sufficiently in undertaking their researches. Knowledge and theories are mainstreamed and applied relative to Africa without significant appreciation of elements of knowledge that could positively impact theories and methodologies most relevant to and from those societies. This is in spite of recognitions of contextual content of ‘everyday sociology’ as necessary for ‘verstehen(ing)’. This challenge also interface with policy papers on the continent. Many policies on the continent fail because their knowledge base is not localized through appropriately indigenous knowledge, thereby leading to failure. This article attempts to show how the incorporation of indigenous knowledge structures into sociology and development policies can assist in development of Africana sociology that will be useful for both theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001, the US National Science Foundation inaugurated the ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program with the primary objective of increasing the participation and advancement of women at American Universities in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Although ADVANCE has been received very well, its effects have been uneven among institutions receiving the ADVANCE grant. In this paper, we reflect on the NSF’s goals for ADVANCE and initiatives ADVANCE schools undertake to increase gender equity in the context of gender organizations theory. Specifically, we comment on tensions that emerged through our own research concerning the relationship between feminist objectives of equity and justice and the nature of the ADVANCE program and transformational initiatives. We conclude by raising the perennial feminist question: ‘Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house?’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]