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Christian theologians and ostensibly secular sociologists of religion rely on different resources to respond to personal, local, or global problems. The environmental crises we see around the world reflect a strict hierarchy between human beings and the natural world. In both the theological and social scientific arenas of the last few decades, however, we see an 'animal turn' that exposes the hubris of anthropocentrism and creates opportunities for new ways of writing and teaching about the natural environment. Using the Pacific Northwest's 'reverential naturalism' as a touchstone, the authors reflect on the extent to which their respective fields prepare secular scholars and theologians to address the crises all animals – including humans – now face. Using a dialogue format, they explore whether theological and social scientific regimes of truth and knowledge are incommensurable. What might this mean for the region and the two fields out of which they authors emerge? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the material dimensions of secrecy, which have been neglected within academic research into consumption and into material culture, are ripe for sociological analysis and attention. We draw on two empirical projects – one using qualitative interviews to talk to women about their sex toys and the other ethnographically informed research into things people keep but are no longer using - to explore secret things within the home. By taking a facet methodology approach, we consider secret objects in relation to each other and interrogate how secrets are made (in)visible through strategies and practices around objects within the home and how the potency of secret objects is managed. We make two key arguments: first, considering the relationship between secrecy and intimacy, we argue that there are three dimensions of secrecy (which do not always coalesce): what is known about, what is verbalised, and what is materialised. Second, we redirect the idea of relational work to material things, looking at where things are kept, who they are revealed to and the silences around things, and argue that these practices are part of the work of everyday relationships and intimacies. The article demonstrates that objects are vital in understanding how secrecy, intimacy and everyday relationships are lived and forms part of a wider argument for the sociology of culture to centre the unnoticed and mundane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways couples making the transition to parenthood think about, practise, and assess 'gender equality'. The analysis draws on data from two qualitative, longitudinal projects in the UK with 36 mixed-sex couples, grounded in the sociology of intimacy and parenting culture respectively. Both projects explore gender relations at the transition to parenthood, with recent changes in UK parental leave as a backdrop, to interrogate couples' ideals and practices. In this article, we outline four configurations of equality articulated by couples: 'symmetry', 'breaking gender stereotypes', 'fairness', and 'equality as respect', which were developed through collaborative analysis. We explore how different configurations shape gendered practices in early parenthood. The analysis provides novel insights into the ways in which 'gender equality' is differentially defined and practised; shaped by the political and cultural context in which parents live; and relational in nature – thereby contributing to debates around equality in gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the literature on person-culture fit, we investigated how culture (assessed as national-level familism), personality (tapped by attachment styles) and their interactions predicted social network characteristics in 21 nations/areas (N = 2977). Multilevel mixed modeling showed that familism predicted smaller network size but greater density, tie strength, and multiplexity. Attachment avoidance predicted smaller network size, and lower density, tie strength, and multiplexity. Attachment anxiety was related to lower density and tie strength. Familism enhanced avoidance's association with network size and reduced its association with density, tie strength, and multiplexity. Familism also enhanced anxiety's association with network size, tie strength, and multiplexity. These findings contribute to theory building on attachment and culture, highlight the significance of culture by personality interaction for the understanding of social networks, and call attention to the importance of sampling multiple countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of media and communications was never explicitly defined – nor was there ever an explicit debate about the sub-field. Not having a clear anchor makes it hard to define what its critical component should be. Nonetheless, a rich yet disconnected tradition of sociology and critical political economy allows flexibility to reconsider communication and social relations in the broader societal dynamics of capitalism. Specifying a critical sociological approach to communication can help better define the role of communication at the micro, mezzo and macro levels of society. The multi-paradigmatic heritage of sociological theory can provide new ways of criticising communication power in contemporary society. Diverse contemporary developments in the critique of political economy give a breadth of understanding of the capitalist mode of production and its internal dynamics. Sociology can add depth to understanding social relations within and beyond the production, distribution and consumption process. This introduction sets out the framework for the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Although today media and communication studies across Latin America are closely linked to critical sociology, this was not always the case. In this article, we explore how the interaction between social communication (which includes communication and media studies) and critical sociology, in the Latin American context, evolved over time. In so doing, we examine how, and in which directions, media theory has developed and how it relates profoundly with critical sociology. This piece is an attempt to summarize this process and look at current contributions that propose more inclusive and participatory media. The key argument that it took a long time for Latin America's media studies to link itself with critical sociology but once that happened, it produced a distinctive school of thought that is counter-hegemonic and directs itself towards the contestation of power and oppression by linking itself with the popular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sourcing practices are among the central research topics within the sociology of the media. Empirical studies have analysed what and who are the major journalistic sources, demonstrating that the selections journalists make not only depend on their subjective choices, but are connected to the norms and routines established in the profession. While invaluable, these studies are primarily media-centric and focused on small-scale investigations, meaning they regularly ignore the social totality in which sourcing is inevitably embedded. Such studies hence also pay too little attention to the external actors that provide 'information subsidies' to journalists. By employing the framework of the public sphere, we show that news sources should be viewed as a topic of central social relevance that touches on wider power relations within society. Sociological approaches should thus be complemented with other critical traditions, for instance the political economy of communication. The latter approach's value is revealed in brief sketches that point to the possibilities of achieving deeper understanding of the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisiting the history of the development of software and communication technologies, this article demonstrates that while the early techno-utopian theories have been balanced by more sombre approaches, the emancipatory potential of productions whose outputs do not take the commodity form deserves further theoretical reflection. Social form and value-form literature provides a way to rethink publicly financed activities and activities of software communities as a variety of social forms of wealth and productions within capitalist social formations. Public wealth, it is argued, is a useful umbrella concept to approach the forms of wealth in the sphere of software, media and communication. With digitally storable matter, due to its replicability at near zero cost, it is of utmost importance that the state provides an institutional framework, primarily for capital, but also for public wealth, to be coded. In this setting, legal form, its content and function play a key role in the contested reproduction between forms of public wealth and capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes into exam the current literature about Big Data and data capitalism, from the perspective of the critical Internet theory. Particular attention will be placed to the ideas of data exploitation and raw data, which will prove to betray a form of digital fetishism: in short, the focus on the final results of the production process, rather than on the social relations by which the very same process is fueled. [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]

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]

Michel Freitag developed a ground-breaking sociological theory synthesizing the thought of sociology's founders into the form of a dialectical sociology that conceives of the symbolic as ontological to social reality. After outlining his conceptualization of the historical evolution of society through its 'modes of reproduction', we will see how his analysis of contemporary societal transformations rests on a critical theory of communication and technology that, while entering a dialogue with the works of the Frankfurt school, especially those of Habermas, seeks to overcome their inherent contradictions. According to Freitag, the development of capitalist globalization alters the very substance of society as it tends to morph itself into a self-regulating cybernetic system. His sociology allows us to apprehend phenomena tied to the development of contemporary digital technologies such as the drive towards a new form of algorithmic governmentality fueled by digital oligopolies that increasingly dominate globalized capitalism, the rise of fake news in the era of post-truth and the transformation of subjectivity. Finally, his critique enables potent reflection on the dialectical possibilities of overcoming the dynamics of contemporary alienation. [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]

The article offers information on re-reading Khaldun's economic thought in present times, highlighting his deep insight into the culture of his day. Topics include Christian Fuchs' approach to demonstrating Khaldun's anticipations of key modern concepts, Khaldun's nominations as the founder of sociology, a pioneering economist, and the first modern historian, and Fuchs' claim of Khaldun for critical political economy and his relevance to critical communication analysis.

Activating social ties is a critical mechanism for satisfying individuals' social, emotional, and material needs. Researchers have offered a number of hypotheses around tie activation about when and why particular supporters step in to help, ranging from strategic activation via functional specificity to opportunistic mobilization. To date, few studies have examined multiple tie activation strategies in tandem. This project focuses on people facing complex, compounding health and social problems, who may have to rely on multiple forms of activation to get their support needs met. We draw on a sample of 92 participants who are affiliated with one of two Care Management programs in the Western United States. Using name generators in a survey, we elicit participants' social networks and find they utilize a number of methods to secure critical support needs, including calling on kin ties to borrow money and help with daily tasks, relying on strong and proximal ties for almost all types of support, and using functional specificity for health support. We then draw on qualitative interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the ways alters provide support and why egos elicit support from some alters and not others. Future research should continue assessing this population's social networks with the aim of leveraging social support to help manage chronic conditions, provide access to resources, and increase their sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the latest decade of Australian sociology PhD completions for differences in the number and quality of research outputs students published during doctoral enrolment. There was no evidence of a statistically significant difference between Go8 PhD students and their non-Go8 PhD counterparts in terms of either the quantity of research publications achieved, or the quality of these publications as measured by high-impact journals. There was also insufficient evidence statistically to conclude that Go8 men and Go8 women differed from one another, or that non-Go8 men and non-Go8 women differed from one another in overall quantity of outputs and publishing in high-impact journals. However, publishing success of men and women, when combined, regardless of whether they were at elite Go8 or non-Go8 institutions, showed gender had a marginally significant effect on publication productivity, men outperforming women, in both publication counts and in publishing in high-impact journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in an Apocalyptic Era, in frustrated disappointed and enraged societies that have lost the future. Eternity has become an outcast and salvation in the afterlife is no longer a leading quest. In short, we live the end of the centrality of the concept of theodicy. The conjunction of the crisis in religious socialization mechanisms and those of secular socialization is what largely generates this widespread disappointment. The idea of Apocalypse, historically related to condemnations and Manichean visions, has returned with force to our contemporary societies through new forms of exclusion and discrimination in populist regimes relating to popular religiosity. The role of sociology of religions is to assess the current social disappointment and demystification of the future and at the same time distinguish and warn about the political processes of reproduction and representation of contemporary apocalypses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the main work of two women in classical sociology, Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) and Ida B. Wells (1862–1931). While some sociologists have pointed to the significance of their work and that of other early women classical sociologists, most sociologists, and in particular, most sociologists of religion, have ignored their work. This article asks which themes in sociology and the sociology of religion these women addressed that many male classical sociologists failed to address. How does the study of these two women point to important issues in current sociology of religion? The analysis shows that central themes in the work of Martineau and Wells were the intersections of religion, gender, race, and social class. Their work also points to another highly important issue seldom addressed in current sociology of religion, namely the link between various forms of religion and the realization of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how people interpret deep transformations, how they integrate them into their everyday meaning-making and what role emotion work plays therein. To do so, the article draws on the experiences of young people (n=68) in post-crisis Spain and their narratives of change. In the wake of the severe economic crisis of 2008, many of them had lost their jobs as well as their future prospects. They experienced a mismatch between their expectations of their (working) life and the actual opportunities on the precarious labour market. Disappointed expectations and crumbling future prospects made it necessary for them to search for explanations and coping strategies. The article proposes the concept of emotive-cognitive reframing to capture the ways in which the young people adapted their emotions, ideas and expectations and the different forms and directions this could take. It shows that emotive-cognitive reframing was a complex and embodied process of emotional and cognitive work in which existing patterns of explanation were questioned and partly replaced by new ones. If these explanations were individualistic in nature, people considered their emotions and how they dealt with them to be a personal matter. In this case, emotion work was more about appeasing and suppressing emotions rather than channelling them into action. If the explanations were systemic, though, emotion work consisted primarily of turning emotions inside out and redirecting them from the individual towards external actors and structural conditions laying the seeds for collective mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special issue, we explore the political salience of emotions in times of large-scale social change, emphasizing the role of personal narratives in understanding and framing these transformations. We introduce the concept of 'deep transformations' to analyse radical shifts in various aspects of life and their emotional and cultural implications. Focusing on cases from the post-socialist world and one contribution from post-2008 Spain, the issue provides novel insights into the interplay between emotions, signification, and social change. We present our contributions as addressing three distinct levels, each underscoring the importance for integrating the sociology of emotions with cultural sociology more closely: remembering change, adapting to change, and imagining change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the nature, movement, and controversies of the information flowing through a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) community-based program in a predominantly Latino migrant neighborhood of South Los Angeles known as 'the Hispanic Outreach' (HO). Combining Actor-Network and Critical Race theories enables me to examine the world of police and Latino civilians through the groups, social actions, facts, and objects that compose it, as one single, unified set of interwoven associations and processes. Findings show that the HO claims to serve the public's interests in safety in high crime environments but instead stirs local interracial conflict and Latino residents' fears over questions of citizenship, belonging, and access to resources, and deepens state penetration into communities it deems as racial threats. I show how networks are state tools that reproduce and reinforce racial power and situate these findings within the field of Critical Sociology, particularly the areas of policing and Latino studies. And this article ends with a discussion of several potential research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the transformation of welfare states carries far-reaching implications for property relations, there is an astonishing amnesia regarding property in research concerning the welfare state. To date, the French sociologist Robert Castel is the only thinker to have illuminated the connection between property and social rights: he understands transfer payments and public infrastructures as social property and describes them as rehabilitation of the previously propertyless. Starting out from Castel's concept of social property, the article discusses its strengths and weaknesses and elaborates conceptually on what it would mean to think of social rights consistently as social property. The authors argue that it is a worthwhile endeavour to think further with and go beyond Castel's concept of social property. This allows not only to think about public alternatives to private property and to theorise the dismantling of social rights as expropriation, but also to think further on the democratisation of social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors' power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour's constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists' practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Achille Mbembe's theorization of necropolitics and surplus life in dialogue with three comparable theorizations: Agamben's 'bare life', Marxist scholarship on 'relative surplus populations', and Afropessimist theorizations of 'social death'. I argue that Mbembe's work allows us to develop a critique of sacrifice that at the same time (contra Agamben) recognizes how it plays a structural role within necropolitics. Examining the influence of Georges Bataille's writings on sacrifice allows me to clarify this argument. The second part of the article examines the 'surplus life' of necropolitics in comparative analysis, tracing some of the limits of Mbembe's reading through a dialogue with Marxist and Afropessimist readings. I characterize Mbembe's work in terms of a poetics and politics of surplus: 'reserves of life' are affirmed against the excess of violence characterizing the present. However, this critique of violence relies upon abrupt leaps from politics to abstract ethical appeals in ways that obscure the implications of Mbembe's own analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the place of the child in the metaphysics and imaginary of Western colonization, racialization, and decolonization. In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, children appear not only as victims but also as a problem for which Fanon struggles to account as a theorist of decolonization as much as a psychiatric practitioner. Through a reading of one of the cases, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune. The work of decolonization, to proceed, thus would demand us to rethink childhood, and in doing so break free of Western metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Stuart Hall's reading of Louis Althusser's main theoretical works. Since the early 1970s, Hall has undertaken a critical confrontation with Althusser's 'structural Marxism', rescuing those useful concepts to think cultural difference and identity, without failing to criticize his 'superstructuralist' interpretation of Marx. However, what Hall will retain as Althusser's most important contribution is, above all, his theory of ideology. In this context, I follow an idea formulated by Hall that could be read as summarizing the theoretical and political scope of Althusser's contribution to Cultural Studies: 'he enabled me to live in and with difference'. By complicating classical interpretations schemes in the Marxist tradition, Hall's Althusser may be read as a 'thinker of difference' who opens up a whole research program to reconsider class conflicts as traversed (or 'overdetermined') by gender, racial or colonial conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud completed his last book, on Moses and Monotheism, in 1939, while in his London exile. Its publication was deemed untimely, as its two main theses could be construed as a form of Jewish self-hatred. The first claim questions Moses' Jewish origins and contends that the founder of the Jews was in fact an Egyptian; the second suggests that the Jews killed Moses and then created his myth as a coping mechanism for concealing their terrible deed. In this article, I contend that Moses and Monotheism can be read as Freud's intervention in debates on the 'Jewish Question'. After revisiting Freud's original argument (I), I assess its reception among leading Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century (II). I then use Freud's arguments to look at the two key themes of the Jewish Question: understanding the defining features of Jewish identity (III) and the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Western culture (IV). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows that Habermas's modernism and Lyotard's postmodernism are not as antithetical as they are often taken to be. First, we argue that Habermas is not a strong foundationalist concerned with identifying universal rules for language, as postmodern critiques have often interpreted him. Instead, he develops a social pragmatics in which the communicative use of language is the fundamental presupposition of any meaningful interaction. Second, we argue that Lyotard is not a relativist who denies any universal linguistic structure. Instead, he claims that language involves a universal element of dissensus that cannot be subordinated to consensus. Third, we show that neither does Habermas defend a new version of the kind of philosophy of history characteristic of the Enlightenment, nor is Lyotard a historical relativist, but instead they both seek alternatives to these positions. The conclusion calls for more nuance in the interpretation of both perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where higher education classrooms can be sites of both cultural contestation and epistemic violence, this article examines the critical and ethical value of building uncertainty into our teaching of gender. The reflective piece draws on my own experience in a new subject at Monash University, and situates this one very small site of knowledge production within the wider processes that shape the (neoliberal) Australian university, and the discipline of sociology. I elaborate a theoretical framework for embracing epistemic uncertainty that is informed by feminist pedagogies and begins with a feminist provocation, and present my practical strategies for organizing knowledge within this framework, as well as the strategies of the students themselves. An analysis of the students' project work (collaborative virtual exhibitions) reveals their capacity to navigate uncertainty through an interpersonal and contextualized approach to knowledge, and produce new learning spaces which unsettle harmful truths and make material new realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent gentrification policies from the municipality of Rotterdam have involved the demolition of social housing, resulting in the displacement of migrant communities. These developments have been criticised by several United Nations Special Rapporteurs as violating the human right to adequate housing. Through qualitative content analysis of municipal policy documents and expert interviews, this article examines how whiteness is preserved in Rotterdam municipal housing policies between the years 2006 and 2022. Using critical race theory, this study identifies three key stages through which whiteness is preserved: in the conceptualisation of theories underpinning policies; the language codified in policy documents, and the implementation of the policy. This research offers a clear example of systemic racism today; how it operates through policies that villainize low-income migrants and justifies the maintenance of the status quo of racial hierarchy in Rotterdam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on keynote speech by the then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Topics include range of social movements arrayed in opposition to colonialism, poverty, and racism mobilized during the Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest; and taking the initiative by planning workshops and social actions to unsettle the discipline's establishment sociology.

This paper engages with Manuel DeLanda's Deleuze-inspired 'assemblage theory' from a perspective sympathetic to Pierre Bourdieu's field theory. It first outlines DeLanda's proposed new 'philosophy of society', focusing on his major works in this vein, and registers some scepticism as to its originality for sociology. It then introduces and responds to DeLanda's critique of Bourdieu. Rather than simply reject assemblage theory outright, however, I draw on selected insights from DeLanda to push field theory in new directions. More specifically, I conceptualise the interplay of fields and assemblages and use notions of 'exteriority' and 'possibility space' to help conceive individual plurality of social positioning and its effects for subjectivity and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skin lightening cuts across multiple and intersecting areas of interest to sociologists. These include consumerism, capital, the body, femininities, masculinities, the power of the media in shaping people's imaginations, constructions of beauty, and racialised and gendered social relations and representations, with the legacies of colonial pasts playing out in the present. Here, we set out some key themes, patterns, and frames observed in the multidisciplinary work published on skin lightening, and advocate for the addition of other frames for strategic reasons, which we argue in the second half of the article. Foucault's technologies of self is recommended as a platform for critiquing individualism and the framing of choice; a political economy approach would help establish that skin lightening is a global business and grasp industry-wide patterns. Finally, a shift to looking at discourse and counter-discourse would reframe women as active agents in cultural resistance and change, and not just the relatively passive dupes of the colonial legacy. We thus map out a broad research agenda that would transform skin lightening into an object of broad, sustained sociological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iranian state is the state of redistribution of oil and gas resources by a wide bureaucracy. Inequitable redistribution of resources and bureaucratic corruption have caused drastic movements in Iran over the past decade and raised the issue of public attitudes toward state funding and spending. Although previous studies in the literature have extensively addressed the rentier Iranian government, the issue of the public attitudes toward redistribution has been largely neglected. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the attitudes of two generations of students toward state financing and expenditure practices in Iran. The data were collected by conducting two surveys in 2003 and 2016. The findings demonstrated that from the perspective of Iranian students, economic corruption is the most important factor leading to economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a socio-political context where antimuslim racism has gained momentum, this article aims to understand Muslim women's everyday life experiences of racialization in Sweden. More importantly, it aims to highlight what strategies are developed in order to navigate and counter these experiences. By using the concepts of double consciousness, orientations, and respectability together with an understanding of Muslims as a racialized category, the article shows how experiences of antimuslim racism are handled by the women in different ways, both on individual and collective level. Being a Muslim woman in Sweden requires developing strategies and sometimes engaging in respectability politics. [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]

Young adults who are not in education or work are often depicted as deviating from the norm of gainful employment that is still widely shared across the Nordic countries. While it has been argued that young adults feel that they are being blamed for their NEET situation, this article seeks to identify the variety of interpretations they have of their situation and what kind of explanations can be proposed for the differences. Theoretically, perspectives from Axel Honneth's recognition theory are combined with Thomas Scheff's sociological work on shame to discuss the variations in the sentiments of young adults. Based on this framework, the article illuminates how young adults use the shared semantics available within their immediate circles to enable them to feel worthy of recognition despite their depicted deviation from the norm of gainful employment. Additionally, the article contributes to sociological debates on Honneth's recognition theory – especially its ambiguous concept of shared semantics – by making sense of the role of communities and institutions as providers of shared semantics. The findings are based on an abductive analysis of 35 in-depth interviews with young Finnish adults aged 18–29 who have been or are currently outside of education or employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on workplace discrimination against LGBT employees in Mauritius – a multi-ethnic society in the Indian Ocean. Drawing from the insights of sociological studies that highlight how the manifestation of practices across settings is shaped by the process by which it is framed, the analysis illustrates the importance of the local context in accounting for the specific forms taken by LGBT workplace discrimination in Mauritius. Reflecting the importance of respect for different ethnic groups in the stability of the Mauritian democracy, the empirical results highlight how instances of workplace discrimination against LGBT employees are pervasive but framed to avoid inter-ethnic conflicts whilst stigmatising LGBT identities as problematic. [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 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]

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]

Between them and IFS officers exists what one millennial officer called "another kind of caste system", with elite-trained diplomats largely keeping to themselves.[32] In fact, a crucial component of the declinist narrative of old-school diplomats fearing the end of an age of enlightened cosmopolitan elites is precisely that supposedly culturally inferior Indians from outside the IFS are ascending the ranks of the MEA. Diplomacy was an inherently elitist endeavour, a renowned former Foreign Secretary argued defensively - "in my time, "elite" wasn't a bad word".[87] Democratization constituted a lowering of standards, complicating the quest for recognition from fellow members of the cosmopolitan elite. The most traditional Western diplomats may have expected "the right mix of drinks, flowers, cheese", but nobody in Moscow seemed to care much for such conventions, an officer wary of his Service's cultural convictions recalled.[90] While suits may work in Geneva, in Kathmandu wearing kurtas 'made it easier to talk to the Nepalis, who were not part of the elite' of international society, one former Ambassador to both believed.[91] Even the epicentre of multilateral posturing and Anglophone socializing was less Eurocentric than IFS elites often intimated: "People in New York speak bad English!" Approximating this theoretical orthodoxy, Indian diplomats, too, occasionally tie their cosmopolitanism to abstract ideals like respect for the Other[3] or articles of liberal faith like universal human rights.[4] Yet ideal theory is not the primary modality in which Indian diplomats practise their cosmopolitanism. [Extracted from the article]

We explore puzzling outcomes in a Virginia school district: in 2018, the Williamsburg-James City County School Board voted to redraw attendance boundaries to achieve greater racial and socio-economic integration among its middle schools, yet abandoned similar efforts for high schools. Drawing on Critical Race perspectives, we conducted a content analysis of archival materials, including school board meeting transcripts, to analyze the conditions under which school decision-makers mobilize to enact equity-oriented policy reforms. We found that school board members abandoned high school rezoning in the face of fierce opposition from white, affluent residents who saw school reassignments as a threat to their entitlements to a highly rated school and to their property values. For the middle schools, board members avoided white families' entitlements, which neutralized opposition, at the same time as strong community advocacy in favor of equity and integration shifted the political landscape. This activated 'interest convergence' among school board members supportive of equity and resulted in the approval of middle-school attendance boundaries that produced greater racial and socioeconomic integration. This case underscores the importance of community advocacy for equity-based reforms; however, the scope of these efforts may be limited to changes that do not substantively threaten white parents' perceived entitlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are two distinct modes of critique operative in Bourdieu's 'critical sociology'. Bourdieu sometimes engages in what I call the realist mode of critique. This is premised on the idea that naïve experience of the social world dissimulates real relations of domination, which critique then reveals. At other times, Bourdieu engages in what I call the historicist mode of critique, which denaturalizes the doxic experience of the social order by demonstrating its arbitrary character. Whereas realist critique claims that the social world really is other than it appears, historicist critique suggests that it could be otherwise. This tension between the two modes of critique is not unique to Bourdieu, but also present in the Polanyian literature and in the Western Marxist tradition. By distinguishing between the two modes of critique, my aim is to clarify an oft-implicit division that cuts across different critical traditions in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the contradictions of neoliberal urbanism in the context of Indian cities. Focusing on gated neighborhoods as a quintessential feature of neoliberal urbanism, it unpacks the changing meaning and significance of gated neighborhoods (GNs) and their representative organizations, the Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), in mediating the relationship between the propertied middle classes and the urban poor. A few decades into the making, I argue that neoliberal urbanism is beginning to produce contradictory outcomes through its specific elements such as the GNs. Using the case of domestic workers, I show that domestic workers are performing collective actions and targeting GNs as a whole. Domestic workers' actions are subverting the purpose of physical features and institutional features of GNs to their advantage as workers. How can middle-class residents' tools of control and exclusion become the new means of power and resistance for a section of the urban poor—domestic workers? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culture of competition in music education is pervasive, reflecting the overall growth in standardization and accountability measures in education. With this study, I addressed the intersection of two underexamined topics in music education: teachers' experience with competitive ensemble events and the structural challenges of working in a low-income, student of color (SOC) majority campus. In this basic qualitative study, I examined how instrumental music teachers navigate the high-stakes policy of an adjudicated large-ensemble contest within and beyond their classrooms. Research questions include the following: (a) What do teachers perceive to be the unique challenges they face in preparing for and participating in ensemble adjudication as a result of their context in a low-income, SOC-majority campus? (b) How does preparation and participation ensemble adjudication influence teaching and learning in instrumental music classrooms? (c) What do teachers perceive to be the function and justification for compulsory ensemble adjudication? Findings suggest that teachers working in these contexts experience unique challenges in preparing for and succeeding in adjudication events due to the intersection of campus-based challenges and policy. In addition, music teachers experience similar narrowing of content and heightened stress as their general education counterparts within accountability structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who is licensed to make knowledge claims about society? A more diffuse group of individuals are afforded the status of legitimate speakers on society in the public sphere than is the case when the questions relate to the expertise of the natural sciences. We draw on the concept of the 'locus of legitimate interpretation' and the sensibilities of Collins and Evans' Studies of Expertise and Experience programme to help make sense of these issues. The social sciences are not the natural sciences, and one key difference is their relationship with publics. The social sciences are intrinsically entangled, at both the level of the research question and the research subject/object, with public knowledge, the knowledges of publics and public interests. We therefore outline what these differences might mean for a serious, distinct and purposive Public Understanding of Social Science programme and how this differs from current work in the Public Understanding of Science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]