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Panic buying of toilet rolls in Australia began in early March 2020. This was related to the realisation that the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country. To the general population the impact of the virus was unknown. Gradually the federal government started closing the country's borders. The panic buying of toilet rolls was not unique to Australia. It happened across all societies that used toilet paper rather than water to clean after defecation and urination. However, research suggests that the panic buying was most extreme in Australia. This article argues that the panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation. This is the fear manifested in the perceived threat posed by the virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including Trumpism during the rise of New China, book review on "Sketches in the Theory of Culture," and sociology's promise.

This paper starts with the observation that at least for the last century there has been an orthodoxy in the social sciences characterized by sui generis structures of various kinds but also (paradoxically) by the unique role of individuals in their ability to intervene in the flow of events. This paper argues that there is a commonality to a number of challenges to orthodoxy that dates back to the beginnings of the social sciences themselves with Vico. Although many connections have been made between elements of these critiques (Latour's connection to Whitehead, Deleuze's connection to Tarde), this paper proposes to make such connections more explicit by focusing on a central commitment to or tendency towards a monism characterized by a univocal ontology. The implication is that these various alternatives perhaps have more in common than normally thought and can continue to learn from each other. Most importantly, they present a coherent and viable alternative to social science orthodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article has two aims: firstly, it provides a holistic account of Zygmunt Bauman's oeuvre, and secondly, it presents an extensive up-to-date and multilingual bibliography of his published writings. The authors discuss Bauman's prolificacy, as well as the stylistic, formal and substantive heterogeneity of his work. Taking this into account, they reflect on the curious reception of his oeuvre in the wider disciplinary field of sociology. The bibliography attached to the paper provides the most complete account of Bauman's writings. Building on previous bibliographies, and drawing on archival research in the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Papers at the University of Leeds, the bibliography spans 63 years from his first publication to his most recent. Many of these papers – both in English and Polish – are presented for the first time in the list of his works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence and trajectory of a vernacular femicide memorial tree at Mount Gravatt (Meanjin/Brisbane) which is juxtaposed with established and regulated official commemorative placemaking practices in this social geography. The paper explores the implicit rules about marking gender in official publics of commemoration, arguing that they perform or conversely risk a doubling of women's invisibility through assimilation into symbols and aesthetic conventions of seemingly settled history and settled subjects. They can become barely noticeable for the kinds of messages they may seek to publicly speak and breakthrough in encounter. Conventional commemoration of violence against women also risks positioning women as 'victims' by not unsettling that position through passive, familiar and assimilationist design forms and narrative tropes. Importantly, memorials that address violence against women and intimate femicide should contest 'active forgetting' by insisting that this is a public facing, collective issue of responsibility against resistant effacements, disavowal, and sequestration into the private sphere and personal life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In drawing out how human lives are always already inextricably entangled with the non-human elements of the world, this paper explores how stone, as a constituent of urban materiality, provokes a wealth of emotional, sensory and affective impacts in the experience of place. The paper discusses how the sonic, tactile and visual qualities of stone contribute to the sensory and affective experience of places, shape the symbolic meanings and affective impacts of diverse memorials, and trigger a powerful sense of geological conviviality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agnes Heller continued her commitment to socialist theory, seeking a democratic alternative to the actually existing socialist system in Soviet-type societies in the early 1980s. Heller conceptualized socialism as a long-term social experiment based on social imagination and the radicalization of democracy, which contrasted with the Soviet socialist project on the one hand, and went beyond Western parliamentary systems on the other hand. My aim in this paper is to examine the 1982 pamphlet, Why We Should Maintain the Socialist Objective, and present it as a crucial step that Heller takes to depart from Marxism and explore her post-Marxist socialist theory. This paper will examine the social imagination, radicalization of democracy, and other key ideas elaborated in the pamphlet, linking these ideas to her subsequent book, Dictatorship Over Needs, and her essay 'The Great Republic'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Eastern European Marxists' consideration of science and technology concerning aesthetic dimensions. Different from most of Western Marxists who take negative or dystopian attitudes towards modern science and technology from the aesthetic utopian perspective, those Marxists who come from countries such as Hungary, Yugoslav, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria or Romania, which once belonged to the socialist camp, under the influence of Soviet and Western culture, pay attention to the complicated tension between science-technology and aesthetics. In this paper, I probe into these notions by reading György Lukács, Budapest School, Romanian theorists and the Yugoslav Praxis Group, which are divided into four key points: basic nature of science in contrast with arts; modern tension of culture between science and arts; the possibility of scientific aesthetics; and development of arts in the world of technology. There is a dialectical understanding of science and technology here which contributes to contemporary recognition of science and technology from the point of view of neo-humanism, not only in aesthetics but also human existence. This is relevant to theoretical reflection on the present and future Chinese socialist aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following paper I will analyse three key themes characteristic of the life and work of Marisha Márkus. This paper was originally read for a conference on her work at the time of her farewell from the University of New South Wales in 2002. Success, Needs and Decency are signature themes that percolate through her work. Under the theme of success I turn to central ideas in her early sociology of women and to the meaning of success in the world of the life of women. This theme has a particular existential theme for Marisha, who nursed her eldest son Gyuri for the last 30 years of her life. The concept of radical needs was a central concept of the work of the Budapest School. Marisha's relatively less well-known interpretation of needs is arguably the most fully democratic reading of this theme that came to be better known in the work of Agnes Heller. I finally turn to the concept of decency, which for Márkus adds value to the key ideal of civil society that became so important in the transition of so-called socialist societies during the collapse of the communist regimes in the Eastern bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns a little-known debate between Jürgen Habermas and György Márkus. Habermas argued that the Marxian paradigm of production was obsolete in the light of his own proposal for a 'communicative turn' in contemporary critical theories that avoids reductivism by focusing on moral learning processes connected to language and communicative interaction. This paper sets out Habermas's critique of the paradigm of production and Márkus's rebuttal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Collins's conflict theory to understand the contemporary surge of populism. It puts forward an account centred on citizenship rights and the state, and on 'my nation first' politics in four countries: the US, Sweden, India and China. Collins has identified a capitalist crisis, the dynamics of geopolitical legitimacy, and state-penetrating bureaucracy as three central processes in modern societies. Especially the last of these focuses attention on the conflict between cosmopolitan elites and 'the people', construed in exclusionary terms, which is on the rise in all of the four cases discussed here. The paper analyses the similarities and differences between them, and sketches the prospects for populist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology today faces a number of serious challenges to its integrity as a discipline. As a synthesis of Weberian and Durkheimian traditions, the work of Randall Collins represents an innovative vindication of sociology in the early 21st century. This article explores Collins's interaction ritual theory to demonstrate its contemporary utility. However, to highlight the importance of Collins's work, it seeks to advance and refine it theoretically. Specifically, it seeks to develop Collins's argument about the role of emotions and, specifically, effervescence, in rituals. This paper argues that, while important, effervescence alone cannot be sufficient to ensure the conformity which is a typical feature of interaction and essential to explaining social order. Drawing on Goffman, Asch and Scheff, the paper argues that effervescence is underpinned by more robust mechanisms of honour and shame, themselves immediately connected to access to collective goods. In this way, the paper affirms the importance of Randall Collins's work for sociology today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu's judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology's evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists' ambitions to apprehend human engagement with the world. Part II shows how two crucial insights of phenomenology, its discovery of both the natural attitude and of the phenomenological epoche, allow an account of perception properly responsive to its intertwined personal and collective aspects. Contra Bourdieu, the paper's third section asserts that phenomenology's substantive socio-cultural analysis simultaneously entails methodological consequences for the social scientist, reversing their suspension of disbelief vis-à-vis the life-worlds of interlocutors and inaugurating the suspension of belief vis-à-vis their own natural attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of the Holocaust on the descendants of survivors and the ways in which they embrace, embody and memorialise their family histories is the subject of this paper. The paper explores intergenerational storytelling and silences about the Holocaust through the lens of the number that was tattooed on the bodies of inmates in the Auschwitz complex and has been replicated on the bodies of some survivor descendants. The number has become a symbol of the crimes of the Holocaust though its meaning has changed during different periods of Holocaust remembrance. Using the genealogy of the tattoo, this paper explores its meaning in relation to private and public memorialisation for the descendants of survivors living in Israel who have replicated the number on their own body. An earlier version of this paper was presented in December 2020 at La Trobe University's Agnes Heller Annual Sociology Lecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does 'communism' mean in Walter Benjamin's writing? It has been used in some quarters to claim that Benjamin has a quasi-Marxist theory of communist society. This paper will argue instead that Benjamin's communism is framed by his distinctive conception of experience and that it is understandable only through that conception. Benjamin's image of 'communist society' refers to a specific type of experience ('collective experience') rather than a type of social organization. The paper discusses the conceptual background of that image and also points out a number of the difficulties that Benjamin's conception of collective experience faces given its genesis in a model of individual experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Andrew Feenberg’s radical democratic politics of technology in relation to the context of Ecuador’s free and open software movement. It considers the articulation of this movement via the government sponsored activist project FLOK Society (Free/Libre Open Knowledge Society). Based on an ethnographic study (2015–16), which included interviews with FLOK Society coordinators, the paper discusses how such government-activist collaborations, may be useful in expanding Feenberg’s notion of technical politics and the nature of representation in the technical sphere. More specifically, the paper looks at the political shaping of technology, in relation to concepts about ‘the Good Life’, or ‘Buen Vivir’ in the case of Ecuador, and its drive toward a knowledge economy, based on the concepts of ‘Buen Conocer’ and ‘Bioconocimiento’ (Good Knowing and Bioknowledge). The paper argues that certain premises held by Feenberg concerning technical politics, democracy and populism in particular may need to be reconsidered in light of developments in Ecuador. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a short history of Agnes Heller's relationship to China through three aspects: imaginative aesthetic enjoyment, real encounters with Chinese cultural spectacles and actual audiences, and the construction of an academic community through creative dialogue. These discussions suggest that Heller felt at home in China. Although Heller has passed away, a home for us remains in her work through remembering her and engaging further with her writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper articulates the separate accounts of facial education and lecturing found in A Thousand Plateaus in order to theorize a new concept of lecturing for a post-digital university. Many accounts of Deleuze and Guattari in educational theory turn away from lecturing as hierarchical and striated, yet this approach denies Deleuze and Guattari's deterritorialization of the practice through their description of a lecture by the character Professor Challenger. When read alongside their plateau on facialization, Challenger's unusual performance can be interpreted as an interruption of the abstract machine of facialization that animates traditional accounts of lecturing. The article concludes with implications for a de-faced form of lecturing for a post-digital university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Auguste Comte's classical status in sociology and social theory is routinely taken to mean outdated. Coupled with this perception, there has been a pervasive tendency within contemporary discourse to presume a positivism that is largely rationalistic or scientistic and therefore critically and analytically useless. This paper explores how some of Comte's lesser acknowledged perspectives on science, history, 'progress' and what it is to be human may yet compel us to reexamine our ideas about the kind of positivism we think we have inherited and therefore need to renounce. I focus my reading of Comte through the lens of genealogies of thought not normally associated with his work, for instance, science and technology studies (STS) and posthumanist social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some texts appear more than once across the corpus of Zygmunt Bauman's work. This has led to accusations of self-plagiarism and a lack of scholarly rigour. This paper is an explanation of why texts reappear. It pays attention to a number of frequently overlooked texts from the 1970s which are of fundamental importance for any understanding of Bauman's work. It is contended that if: (a) there is an understanding of the stakes and purpose of sociology as it is framed in Bauman's work; and (b) attention is paid to the argument of Hermeneutics and Social Science; then (c) the repetition of texts across the work becomes explicable and unproblematic. The paper argues that dealings with Bauman's work need to be more aware of the less well-known texts. They also need to be alert to different – and incommensurable – ways of practising sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populist representation is the process by which a body or set of bodies become the signifier of a powerful act of political transgression of the social order. We call this specific type of representative linkage 'synecdochal representation'. In it, the leader's body performs three key functions: it mirrors certain popular traits that are characterized as 'low', it displays marks of exceptionality, and it appropriates symbols of institutional power. These tasks are performed through particular ways of acting, dressing, talking, eating, and the like, in public. Social media has become a key locus for bodily self-presentation because it is used to create the appearance of intimacy and spontaneity through the distribution of 'candid' pictures and videos. This paper will analyze how the self-presentation of populist and non-populist leaders are established through Twitter, what images they choose to disseminate, and how they are re-signified by the audience. To do so, we will focus on the two Latin American politicians: Cristina Fernández (with a populist style) and Mauricio Macri (with a technocratic one). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many utopian visions operate by scapegoating an Otherness. They blame an 'enemy' for an unbearable, dystopian current reality, holding the 'enemy' responsible for it or for obstructing the passage to a desired, new reality. Then they exclude (or even promise the elimination of) this 'enemy'. Despite the renewed interest in utopias, such utopian frames remain theoretically neglected or, worse, they are considered typical of the logical structure of utopianism. This paper aims to show that this issue merits a different political-philosophical attention. We begin with operations of utopian predicates in the relevant scholarship and distinguish them from the operations of the term 'incriminatory' that we are introducing. We term incriminatory the kind of utopian frame whose future-oriented, idealized and desired image is constructed in and through an incriminated 'Other'. We indicate the re-conceptualizing merits of this new term and then we discuss the affirmative utopianism that does not incriminate a specific Other. Our main argument, which we deploy contra Yannis Stavrakakis's position, is that utopias are not unavoidably or inherently incriminatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we seek to examine the quest for a better way of life through migration, known as lifestyle migration, by positioning place as the a priori condition through which this experience happens. Following the work of Malpas, we argue that lifestyle migration literature has often positioned place in the background, failing to notice how an individual's style of life is enacted through place and because of it. In order to understand the lifestyle in these migrations, place must be taken seriously as a grounding theoretical and empirical topic for investigation. Using a topographical approach, we propose using the metaphorical concept of 'survey marks' which are designed to understand the different components of place which make up the whole. We set out three of these in our interrogation of empirical research of lifestyle migrants in Tasmania and on the Sunshine Coast in Australia to illustrate the importance of place in this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a biographical outline of the life of Cornelius Castoriadis and the intersections between philosophy, politics and experience that shaped his vibrant and prolific intellectual contribution. Castoriadis grew up in Athens, at a time when Greece's internal differences came to the fore as a result of the movements of wider European history. This was a symbolic beginning that set up his migration to Paris and shaped the trajectory of this thought. In Castoriadis, we discover a fiercely independent character fixated on contributing to a more just society. In this, and in his passion for knowledge and discourse, we can detect both an Athenian citizen and a champion of the Enlightenment. In this amalgam, his location in Paris and commitment to politics are both the choices and conditions of his life and character. This paper plays on this pendulum between Athens and Paris as well as between politics and philosophy and positions Castoriadis as an Enlightenment thinker with an eye and an ear for the quotidian pulse of the social historical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of a new phase of earth history, the Anthropocene, position human world-making activity as a bio-geological force. Social interventions into earth systems have been extensive and malignant, altering the earth's surface, atmosphere, oceans, and systems of nutrient cycling. To adapt and respond to emerging planetary dangers requires the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines. In this paper, I argue that a coalition of the arts and sciences might draw upon György Márkus's extensive studies of the topography of 'high' culture. I reconstruct Márkus's conceptual map of the arts and sciences as regions of 'high' cultural activity, each with their own criteria of value yet subject to an integral unity and shared ambition. Both regions of 'high' culture aim to create original works of significance for an engaged public. I then examine the implications of Márkus's claim that the classical vocation of robust, public-oriented culture has run aground. The field of problems that this paper traverses are not the ecological crises of the Anthropocene per se. I attend rather to Márkus's account of the neoliberal erosion of cultural infrastructure where democratic publics might engage with such problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and temperament, of the early 20th-century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid. With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector masquerade as education as a social good while the 'university' itself is skewered with the tragic realism of forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the meaning of the concept of ‘second-order observation’ used by Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998). Luhmann identifies second-order observation as a defining characteristic of modern world society. According to Luhmann, all social systems construct a social reality on the basis of the observation of observations. Rating agencies in the economy or the peer-review process in the academic system are examples of social mechanisms manifesting second-order observation. Social media also represent organized second-order observation. The paper suggests that in a society based on second-order observation, ‘genuine pretending’ is an adequate mode of existence. This notion is derived from the Daoist text Zhuangzi. It indicates a disassociation from social roles which allows their performers to exercise these roles with ease and, at the same time, maintain a state of sanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Heller's aesthetic ethics in her feeling theory. 'Feeling' is an aesthetic problem as well as an ethical problem. Heller discusses the important role of emotions in modern life. 'Housekeeping of feelings' is the key category of Heller's ethical aesthetics, which is related to one's self-realization. It is beneficial to the formation of individual value and helps to reconstruct an increasingly atomized community. The housekeeping of feelings is some kind of care, which is important both ethically and aesthetically. Heller's feelings theory is based on human value itself, which is of great methodological significance for the reconstruction of the broken emotional community in the post-epidemic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores Sreten Petrović's contribution to Marxist aesthetics. Petrović developed his theory within the framework of the Yugoslav Praxis School, although he was not a member of it. Petrović followed Danko Grlić, a prominent member of the Praxis School, in explaining art as a specific emanation of praxis – free, creative, autonomous and self-emancipatory activity beyond the commodity form of capitalist society. Art was thus understood as the liberation and emancipation of Being and its essence. However, Petrović also introduced a novelty – he claimed that art can never be fully understood nor explained. According to him, the only true Marxist aesthetics, given our limited cognitive abilities and the capitalist imperative of producing commodities, would be to limit aesthetics to meta-aesthetics and affirm the 'critique of the aesthetic mind'. We argue that by limiting aesthetics to meta-aesthetics Petrović is following the young Wittgenstein and his proposition that the world is unintelligible to philosophy. Accordingly, we claim that Petrović's contribution should be seen as an important contribution to Marxist aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses exile and emigration as factors in the encounters of art, philosophy, cultural criticism, and political power in Soviet Russia under Stalin. While by now we possess considerable knowledge about emigration and exile from Eastern and Central Europe to the West in the 1920s and 1930s, we have tended to under-research and under-conceptualize the alternative destination. Seemingly less glamorous and lastingly tainted by the open glorification or silent acquiescence to Stalin and the purges, Moscow as a place of emigration and exile of left East-Central European intellectuals in the 1930s presents a uniquely important trajectory, the study of which contributes to enriching and refining our understanding not just of the history of international communism, but also – and perhaps more importantly – of the formation of the intellectual and political elites that were to shape life in the Eastern Bloc after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zygmunt Bauman said of 1968 that he could not empathize with the enthusiasm of the Western Left, that this was some kind of party. In Eastern Europe 1968 stood for an end, not a hope. Soon Bauman would be forced into exile, opening a new and brilliant phase of his intellectual trajectory. Sketches in the Theory of Culture was his last Polish book. It was suppressed in 1968, the contract cancelled in retaliation against his support for reforming politics. Now it has been rediscovered, originally in galley proofs, and translated by Dariusz Brzezinski for Polity Press. Like much of Bauman's work, it is sprawling and inclusive, taking in anthropology, sociology of culture, ethnology and semiotics. It anticipates his life-long enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss; and it also foreshadows some of the themes much later to be identified as liquid modern, though it may be the case that the theme of continuity is rather social turbulence from postwar reconstruction to the travails of socialist Poland. In this paper I review some of its themes and its status in the body of his work, and offer some introductory remarks on its importance to the study of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the development of the political thought of Czech Marxist philosopher Egon Bondy. It examines his criticism of state socialism in the Eastern Block from a Marxist perspective, and it outlines the development of his analysis. The study covers the period from the late 1960s until the Velvet Revolution in 1989, a period during which Bondy explored the historical constitution and nature of a 'new ruling class' in the USSR, as well as deeper trends of convergence between Eastern and Western politico-economical systems. In the 1980s Bondy analysed the reasons for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. Even though Bondy was, during most of the period of state socialism between 1948–89, a forbidden author, he was also one of the main critics of the political approach of Charta 77 and Václav Havel. This criticism is also outlined in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Georg Lukács, for it is in his work, and the attendant debates and disagreements, that an entire constellation of questions around Realism is first compellingly formulated. The purpose of the paper is to revisit Lukács' theory of realism as a response to a host of mainstream currents shaping the landscape of Continental philosophy in the first three decades of the 20th century. Particular attention is paid to the problem of form and truth at the core of Lukács' theory of realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the world, Eastern European critical theory is enjoying a moderate, yet exciting, resurgence. From its oppositional roots in praxis philosophy and critical sociology, this diffuse and dynamic tradition has expanded its field of concern to encompass, among other problems, the aporias of democracy, the Holocaust and legacies of totalitarianism, the vicissitudes of modern culture and the ethical imperatives of living after the grand narrative. In the process, Eastern European thought has come to figure as a vital alternative to the dominant tendencies emanating from Frankfurt and Paris. This essay surveys and introduces a collection of papers delivered at The International Conference of Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe held in Chengdu, P.R.C., in November 2018. It both highlights the thematic range of contemporary scholarship on Eastern European critical theory and signals potential directions in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on an invited Thesis Eleven presentation (8 August 2019), provides a 'map of technopolitics' that springs from an investigation of the theoretical notion of technological convergence adopted by the US National Science Foundation, signaling a new paradigm of 'nano-bio-info-cogno' (NBIC) technologies. This integration at the nano-level is expected to drive the next wave of scientific research, technology and knowledge economy. The paper explores the concept of 'technopolitics' by investigating the links between Wittgenstein's anti-scientism and Lyotard's 'technoscience', reviewing the history of the notion in the work of the Belgium philosopher Gilbert Hottois. The 'deep convergence' representing a new technoscientific synergy is the product of long-term trends of 'bioinformational capitalism' that harnesses the twin forces of information and genetic sciences that coalesce in the least mature 'cognosciences' in their application to education and research. The map of technopolitics systematically identifies the political relations between Big Tech and 'new digital publics' to reveal that the new paradigm is based on the supreme value of cognitive efficiency. There are a closely-knit cluster of concerns that frame a map of political issues about the fifth-generation technological impacts on human beings, their bodies and minds, and public institutions, not least the logic of the distribution and ownership of data, information and knowledge, and its effects on democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with a rise of populism seemingly in all corners of the globe, the need to facilitate meaningful communication between different world-views and to resist the closing down of dialogue is pressing. In this paper, I argue that Zygmunt Bauman's sociological method has always been concerned with this problem and that a better appreciation of his writings on hermeneutics provides us with a vital strategy for resisting fundamentalist thinking in today's dark times. To begin, I briefly explore the relationship between hermeneutics and fundamentalism before moving on to elaborate Bauman's method of sociological hermeneutics. In the final section of the paper, I assess the implications that Bauman's method has for the discipline of sociology at a time when the certainty of things is the most avid of dreams dreamed by people harassed and oppressed by the uncertainty of liquid modern life, apparently whatever the human consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that Bauman's personal experiences deeply shaped his work. In the first part, I draw upon my own research, combining archive documents and interviews data, as well as – for the very first time – details taken from Zygmunt Bauman's own unpublished autobiography, accessed courtesy of the Zygmunt and Janina Bauman Archive project at the University of Leeds. The second part of the paper draws upon my wider ethnographical study into the lived experiences of asylum seekers, conducted between 2017 and 2019 in Southern Europe. I focus here upon their experience of escape and their present life conditions in order to highlight important parallels with Bauman's own experiences as a refugee. The conclusion draws both cases together in order to understand a less overt aspect of Bauman's sociology and to claim that the term 'migrant' is both discriminatory and, in academic terms, incorrect. I argue that this diagnosis is reinforced further by the voices of intellectuals who themselves experienced the status of refugees: namely, Zygmunt Bauman and Hannah Arendt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue outlines the significance of Randall Collins's contribution to sociology. The first section briefly reviews Collins's main books and assesses their impact on social science. The second section offers a summary overview of the papers that comprise the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways nationalism has been theorised in classical and contemporary sociology. More specifically, the author analyses the relevance of Randall Collins's contribution to theories of nationalism. Since Collins's work is firmly rooted in the classical tradition, including the reinterpretation and synthesis of Weber, Durkheim and Goffman, the first part of this paper zooms in on the classics of sociology and their treatment of nations and nationalism. The second part of the paper outlines the key features of Collins's approach and identifies the strengths and weaknesses of this position. The final part builds on the footsteps of Collins and others to articulate an alternative approach focused on the coercive organisational, ideological and micro-interactional grounding of nationalisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At times of crisis, existing institutional arrangements of societies are thrown into question. Crises that occur in multiple societies simultaneously present rare opportunities for comparative empirical analysis. Social theory can reveal the framing conditions of the responses to crises and the sources of variations between them. This paper compares the immediate responses of the Australian, UK and US governments to the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly with regard to financing lockdowns, and points out significant differences between the three approaches. Drawing on Polanyi's method of institutional analysis, we compare the responses of these same national groups to an earlier crisis, the Japanese prisoner of war camps during the Second World War, to show similar patterns of integration recurring eight decades apart. This analysis shows that aspects of moral economies that are not usually apparent can become pronounced during crises, and points to the importance of enduring social imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 25 years, major research in media and cultural studies has investigated the play of affect in our cultures. 'Affect', as a term derived from its neurophysiological and psychological origins, defines the particular movement of feeling from sensation to its attribution as an identifiable emotion. This article explores the way that 'affect' to emotion is being curated online by users particularly of social media as they learn to structure how they are perceived in online culture by others. It also investigates how the specific correlating of affect to emotion is one of the essential algorithmically generated activities of social media and online corporations. To discern this flow of affect and emotion, the article works to identify how this online cultural pandemic has intersected with the COVID-19 pandemic and produced a new level and intensity of affect and emotion curation as greater parts of our connected cultures are being managed and moderated by ourselves as well as governments, corporations and institutions. The neologism 'covidiquette' is used to describe this new form of online curation of cultures, and a further pandemic expansion of this movement of affect into attribution – transnationally, governmentally and commercially. Key pathways for investigating this correlation – and curation – of affect are analysed in this paper during 2020 and 2021 and the ever-presence of COVID-19 and its unique capacity to produce a proliferation of sharing, connection and – critically – surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monuments and statues are forms of commemoration. They typically pay tribute to people or events and aim to serve as a permanent marker, a link between present and past generations, committing them to memory and assigning them with importance and meaning. While commemorations can be beneficial in terms of recognising a legacy of the past and helping foster relationships between opposing groups, they can also be divisive and painful, failing to acknowledge other dimensions of historical fact and further hardening the boundaries between groups in conflict. Essentially, what we choose to commemorate reflects what we as a society actually value. This paper focuses on the unsettled fates of the Captain Cook statue that stands with prominence in Hyde Park, Warrane, and other colonial monuments in Australia. It also discusses the emotionality surrounding such commemorations. We question whether Cook's actual achievements constitute the notoriety that has been bestowed upon him. A range of commentators have put forward ideas around what to do about the Cook statue which we discuss while also considering what the future might look like if the truth of colonial history is known and open conversations can be had. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special issue focuses on the complex and contradictory relationships of empires and nation-states. It contests the traditional views that posit nation-states and empires as the mutually exclusive forms of state organization. The paper identifies the key features of these two ideal types and then briefly reviews the current developments in this field. This introduction also provides a summary overview of the nine contributions that compose the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates Günther Anders's diagnosis of a shift in the modes of human self-production from hermeneutic and educational practices to techno-scientific interventions in the broader context of observations concerning posthumanism and biopolitics (e.g. Peter Sloterdijk, Giorgio Agamben). It proposes to reframe the problem of human self-production within the philosophy of media and traces a common anti-hermeneutic trajectory to which both technoscientific transhumanism and certain strands of posthumanism belong, insofar as they are based on an ontology that exclusively considers causally effective agency. With Anders and Martin Heidegger it is argued that such a focus on agency neglects the dimension of meaning that irreducibly guides technoscientific interventions. The paper claims that, with regard to the escalating dynamics both of human enhancement and of the Anthropocene, neither a truly critical theoretical stance nor a practical subversion is possible without taking the horizons of meaning into account that drive these dynamics. The last section sketches an outline of the complex interrelations of humans, technologies and meaning that cannot be mapped in terms of causally effective agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a revival of notions of leader democracy (LD) and plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD) both at the level of politics (e.g. the rhetoric of strong leadership) and in academic debate. This paper focuses largely on the latter, with occasional reference to real-world political developments. The paper (i) sketches changes in the nature of contemporary governance; (ii) argues that Weber’s and Schumpeter’s account of (plebiscitary) leader democracy ((P)LD) as a means of addressing the crisis of representation has marked affinities with current debates; (iii) discusses the possible implications of the re-emergence of a political language of (P)LD. The paper takes a sceptical view, arguing that an appeal to leadership is a symptom of, and contributor towards, the problems it purports to address. Two contemporary defences of (P)LD are discussed: that of the political scientist András Körösényi and that of the political theorist Jeffery Green. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing project to issue the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, which will make all of her writings available in English translation, provides a critical lens to re-evaluate aspects of Luxemburg's theoretical contribution that has often been passed over in much of the secondary literature on her. Of foremost importance in this regard is the distinctive contribution that she made to the understanding of how to achieve a transition to socialism in a developing society that remains surrounded by the capitalist world market and imperialist powers. This paper aims to show that her reflections during and after the 1905 Revolution, especially as reflected in a series of rarely studied articles and essays in the Polish revolutionary press, provides an important corrective to how the transition to socialism was understood by other Marxist currents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development of Honneth’s thought on work. It considers how his initial concerns with the embodied experience of labour and the absence of a contemporary and compelling class-specific lexicon with which to explore suffering at work have been surpassed and subordinated by his analysis of the social relations of recognition in civil society, which is distributed according to a contested and contestable achievement principle. I argue that despite the purchase of the criticisms offered by recent rejoinders, they fail to engage with the strength of his analysis: that modern economics contains a normative (recognition) order which works to justify the extant division of labour and income, even if its current formulation supports inequity, exclusion and exploitation. Feminist political economy is an ally in this analysis. The paper explores the points of intersection between these projects, but argues that incorporating feminist insights will require a fundamental revision to Honneth’s account of social rationalization in modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite appearing side by side as keynote speakers at a congress in 1962 devoted to the question of progress, Löwith's and Adorno's accounts of progress have never been linked. This paper is an attempt to establish this missed connection, to reveal important connections, striking similarities, and a fundamental difference between these two eminent thinkers' work on progress. For one, Löwith diagnoses the three main problems that Adorno attempts to solve with his dialectical account of progress. Moreover, each is sympathetic towards crucial aspects of the other's account: Löwith towards Adorno's claim that progress is dialectical, Adorno towards Löwith's claim that progress necessarily has a redemptive aspect. A fundamental disagreement nevertheless divides them: whether the problem of suffering in history is part of our ontological condition, or something we must struggle against and overcome through political action. By establishing this missed connection, I hope to show how progress might still have an important role to play in our present-day historical and political consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]