Search

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]

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]

Evidently, Wälder's analysis of mass psychosis and its impact on the individual undoubtedly both deepened and extended Freud's original understanding of mass psychology. (Freud, SE 18: 134) However, Freud added that 'this kind of I differentiating grade in the ego i as a I first step i in an I analysis of the ego i must gradually establish its justification in the most various regions of psychology' (Freud, SE 18, 1920: 132 italics mine). Keywords: mass psychology; mass behaviour; mass psychosis; Robert Wälder; Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego EN mass psychology mass behaviour mass psychosis Robert Wälder Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 342 352 11 11/01/22 20220901 NES 220901 Introduction Freud's approach to mass psychology builds on the analysis of the individual ego. Foulkes and Wälder In his autobiographical notes, Foulkes recollected "the many hours" he spent discussing the latest advances of psychoanalytic theory with his friend and colleague Robert Wälder in Vienna in the late 1920s ([16]: 120), namely Freud's paper on I Beyond the pleasure principle i ([18]) and most probably also I Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego i ([19]). [Extracted from the article]

Background: Financial inequalities appear to be increasing and poverty is becoming ubiquitous. Poverty affects mental health but its impact on mental health and wellbeing is rarely highlighted within health research. Aims: The Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukrainian invasion and other international and national events have led to a cost-of-living crisis for many people. This is likely to lead to an increase in related referrals and therefore active consideration of the relevant issues relating to poverty appears vital. This paper reports a study which sought to understand how therapists experienced their work with clients who self-refer due to living in poverty. Method: Eight therapists participated in semi-structured interviews analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Three superordinate themes were elicited: firstly 'Resilience in the struggle to engage with therapeutic work', secondly 'Struggling to promote social activism' and thirdly, 'Navigating multiple challenges and barriers'. Each superordinate theme contains two or three sub themes. Conclusions: Issues of structural inequality (including but not limited to poverty) impact significantly on people's lives but are often ignored or minimised in therapeutic work. It is important that therapists are aware of poverty and take this into account when working with clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time plays an integral role in understanding how the social is possible. However, most discussions of sociological classical thinkers—such as Georg Simmel—remain starkly underexplored in terms of their theories' temporal presuppositions. While most responses to Simmel's work credit him for his major contributions to the sociology of space, in this paper I aim to systematically reconstruct his explicit and implicit temporal assumptions and explore how these inform some of his social-theoretical writings and his sharp temporal diagnosis of modernity. For this purpose, I re-evaluate some of his central works using a theory distinction between social-theory, which aims to answer what constitutes the social, versus theory-of-society, where the key focus is what form or forms human societies have taken so far, and especially what form modern society takes. By offering a new reading of Simmel's philosophical and sociological writings, I formulate a comprehensive social theory of time, in which time is both located within individual consciousness and reciprocally mediated by a culturally fixed and supra-individual timeframe, thus highlighting the temporal tensions between individual flexibility and social standardization and coordination. Simmel's diagnosis of modernity reveals a conceptualization of time in spatialized terms, a monetization of time, and an acceleration of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of National Socialism in the late 1920s and 1930s happened within democratic societies with well-developed media systems. This gives rise to whether an increasingly right-wing press climate aided the emergence of National Socialism. Based on a comparative analysis of post-election reporting in German and Austrian newspapers, this paper argues that changes in the spectrum of opinion-leading media and in the relations both between them and with the opinion-following media can serve as indicators of a democracy at risk. Utilizing sociometric theory, it is hypothesized that in times of severe democratic crisis, the gap between elite-dominated, opinion-leading media and mass newspapers widens; reciprocal orientation among the opinion-leading media is lessened; and, finally, the composition of this group changes in favour of radical political forces. There is empirical evidence for all assumptions, reflecting a growing significance of extreme right-wing positions in the political information environment. [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]

"The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans" is a book that explores the concept of imposters and their role in society. The book brings together papers from scholars in various disciplines who examine different aspects of identity deception. The editors define an imposter as someone who pretends to be someone else to deceive others, and argue that imposters can be found in various realms of society, including media, science, politics, and everyday life. The book argues that the concept of imposters can be used as an analytical tool to understand social relations and cultural forms. While the book provides a wide range of interesting studies, it misses an opportunity to explore the micro-sociological perspective on identity deception and does not pay enough attention to the subjective experience of being an imposter. Overall, the book offers a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the topic of imposters. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper I discuss Hans Blumenberg's The Rigorism of Truth, a short polemic that criticizes Freud and Hannah Arendt for placing (what he considers) a misplaced faith in the liberatory potential of rational truth in moments of historical disaster. The secondary literature suggests that this piece exhibits either all the signs of a late, Romantic capitulation to the 'need' for myth, or Blumenberg's failure to recognize his own faith and debts to the 'mythology' of reason's emancipatory hopes. My argument hinges on the claim that these readings put undue emphasis on the philosophical anthropology component of Blumenberg's work. Instead, I offer a new reading of the essay, in keeping with an alternative reading of his theory of myth. The essay transforms, then, from a polemic regarding the need for myth, into a nuanced description of the ways in which we can overestimate our capacity to overcome it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries understood as a micro-level caring profession, recently social work is dramatically changing its goals due to structural changes in societies, climate change, migration and political instability. The article employs cross-cultural comparisons that aim to reveal the invariant structure of the social work field, which is realized through the unique manifestations of social work practices in different cultural contexts in Lithuania, Japan, and the United States. The research identifies four social work practices in the professional fields and presents them based on the concepts of field, habitus, and capital, highlighting the similarities and differences between countries in the application of rules of the social field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health policies and the problems they constitute are deeply shaped by multiple publics. In this article we conceptualize health policy counterpublics : temporally bounded socio-political forms that aim to cultivate particular modes of conduct, generally to resist trajectories set by arms of the state. These counterpublics often emerge from existing social movements and involve varied forms of activism and advocacy. We examine a health policy counterpublic that has arisen in response to new forms of HIV public health surveillance by drawing on public documents and interview data from 2021 with 26 stakeholders who were critical of key policy developments. Since 2018, the national rollout of molecular HIV surveillance (MHS) and cluster detection and response (CDR) programs in the United States has produced sustained controversies among HIV stakeholders, including among organized networks of people living with HIV. This article focuses on how a health policy counterpublic formed around MHS/CDR and how constituents problematized the policy agenda set in motion by federal health agencies, including in relation to data ethics, the meaningful involvement of affected communities, informed consent, the digitization of health systems, and HIV criminalization. Although familiar problems in HIV policymaking, concerns about these issues have been reconfigured in response to the new sociotechnical milieu proffered by MHS/CDR, generating new critical positions aiming to remake public health. Critical attention to the scenes within which health policy controversies play out ought to consider how (counter)publics are made, how problems are constituted, and the broader social movement dynamics and activist resources drawn upon to contest and reimagine policymaking in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to an article on public police special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams written by Jenkins and colleagues (2020). Jenkins and colleagues are responding to a study showing that tactical units and members are being used more in Canadian policing. For Jenkins and colleagues, not only are SWAT teams being used properly, but drawing from interviews with tactical members they suggest SWAT teams should be used more in the future. This response focuses on conceptual, methodological, and empirical deficiencies in the work of Jenkins and colleagues. This response shows that Jenkins and colleagues ignore social theory, ignore relevant contrary data, are ignorant of the harms of policing, and are ignorant of the violence that Black and Indigenous peoples face from Canadian police. Relatedly, this response offers a criticism of what is called evidence-based policing scholarship. Using the work of Jenkins and colleagues as an example, the argument here is that evidence-based policing scholars are in a conflict of interest because of how closely they work with police and due to the funding they receive from police agencies and justice ministries. This conflict of interest decreases the credibility and trustworthiness of the claims of evidence-based policing scholars. Overall, this response draws attention not only to the harms of public policing and criminalization, but also to how evidence-based policing scholarship is supporting the expansion of violent, harmful, and regressive forms of social control. [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 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]

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]

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]

Classical sociology has long served as a locus for the discipline's self-understanding, and is a phenomenon increasingly studied in its own right. The growing literature is synthesised in Peter Baehr's renowned framework for scrutinising reception and formation processes. By theorising on the trajectories of multiple classics, Baehr has helped pave the way for sociology's understanding of how classicality becomes established. This paper deploys this framework in order to appraise neglected work with classicality potential in early sociology, namely the bulky production of Sweden's main candidate for a classic, Gustaf F. Steffen (1864–1929), with special attention given to his magnum opus Sociology: A general theory of society (1910–1911). The analysis exposes some of the conceptual ambiguity in Baehr's framework, while proposing that both the notion of a 'classic' and the sole focus on reception and formation need to be expanded. This article also argues that our understanding of classicality could be advanced if we were to distinguish between author, text, and theory, since each of these plays different roles in reception, formation, and neglection processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores technology-human relations in a time of artificial intelligence (AI) and in the context of long-standing problems in social theory about agency, nonhumans, and autonomy. Most theorizations of AI are grounded in dualistic thinking and traditional views of technology, oversimplifying real-world settings. This article works to unfold modes of existence at play in AI/human relations. Materials from ethnographic fieldwork are used to highlight the significance of autonomy in AI/human relations. The analysis suggests that the idea of autonomy is a double-edged sword, showing that humans not only coordinate their perception of autonomy but also switch between registers by sometimes ascribing certain autonomous features to the AI system and in other situations denying the system such features. As a result, AI/human relations prove to be not so much determined by any ostensive delegation of tasks as by the way in which AI and humans engage with each other in practice. The article suggests a theory of relationality that redirects focus away from questions of agency towards questions of what it means to be in relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements, NGOs and other political actors often mobilise the law for social change. Strategic litigation and collective legal mobilisation can be key instruments to face current political challenges like the climate crisis, human rights violations against refugees or the exploitation of workers along global supply chains. Although these struggles are framed by a societal context and have impacts on the political and juridical fields, the literature about legal mobilisation still does not decidedly engage with a social-theory-based perspective on such struggles. By developing the concept of legal struggles, the article proposes a conceptual framework to analyse both the ambivalence and the emancipatory potential of progressive struggles in the juridical field. Critical Theory, Materialist Theory and the Theory of Social Fields by Pierre Bourdieu are combined to investigate the specific form of collective legal struggles carried out in this arena. We examine repertoires and strategies of collective actors as well as the emancipatory potential of these mobilisation strategies. Our conclusions point to the structural distinctions and selectivities which define the juridical field in capitalist societies and also the conditions of possibility of political struggles using the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adorno's social theory is enjoying renewed attention, as is the debate to what extent is it Marxist. A central issue remains Adorno's concept of social totality: capitalism as a fully integrated society in which every difference is levelled. One problem this raises is why is he still committed to the Marxist concept of class. And second, how to understand his critique of the idea of proletarian class-consciousness, which seems to leave his critical theory without an addressee. The article suggests that, for Adorno, capitalist society exhibits what is termed here "differential integration." It is predicated both on the labor/capital distinction and, at the same time, on sufficient homology between the two, such that the qualitative class divide is experienced as mere quantitative variance. This efficacious gap between social structure and social experience is at the center of his concept of ideology. Ideology-critique for Adorno is mainly the critique of symptomatic misconceptions of how ideology functions, due to lack of attention to how the class structure is in fact not experienced as such. Adorno's alternative to proletarian class consciousness is "differential solidarity": consciousness of social domination that is on the one hand found across class divides yet is experienced differentially between them. [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]

Women's entry into policing, a traditionally masculine occupation, has been theorized almost entirely through a liberal feminist theoretical lens where equality with men is the end target. From this theoretical viewpoint, women's police stations in the Global South established specifically to respond to gender violence have been conceptualized as relics from the past. We argue that this approach is based on a global epistemology that privileges the Global North as the normative benchmark from which to define progress. Framed by southern criminology, we offer an alternative way of theorizing the progress of women in policing using women's police stations that emerged in Latin America in the 1980s, specifically those in the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracy theories have recently come under the scrutiny of social psychology. While some theorists have treated them as a deficient way of thinking, others have considered them as a form of political rhetoric with important social implications. We focus on conspiracy theories in the context of online public deliberation on legislation allowing registration of self-defined gender in Greece. Employing the tools of Critical Discursive Psychology, we analyse comments posted on the Ministry of Justice's website created for public consultation about the law change. We focus on the mobilization of conspiracy theories by people who oppose Law 4491/2017 ("Legal Recognition of Gender Identity – National Mechanism for the Development, Monitoring and Evaluation of Action Plans on Children's Rights and Other Provisions"). These commentators often argued that powerful groups are behind the proposed legislation, aiming at decreasing Earth's population, disrupting moral order, and violating humanness. We demonstrate how these constructions helped participants to perform various tasks, such as delegitimizing the legislation while at the same time avoiding the stigma of prejudice, promoting far-right political practices, and rebutting accusations of political partisanship. The results are discussed in relation to conspiracy theories' role in countering "gender ideology" and in promoting cisgenderism and heteronormativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to a call for systematic contributions on the theory of society, the principle aim of this article is to recover and reconstruct the Young-Hegelian core of critical theory's theory of the dialectical development of society and, on that basis, to project its creative research-based continuation by analysing its largely neglected key concept of possibility. The acknowledgement of the critical theory lineage's naturalist, realist and especially idealist features leads this reconstruction to ascribe a central role to certain pivotal concepts that deserve special attention – including nature, the construction of society, evolution, immanent–transcendence and the conceptual conditions or cognitive order of society. A side effect of this theoretical exposition is the exposure in the course of the argument of certain weaknesses often visible in the contemporary articulation of the theory of society in both critical theory and general social theory. Conceptual solutions to those deficiencies are simultaneously presented in a form appropriate to critical theory's modal-based negative explanatory and positive disclosing critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the West German New Left in part drew from the particular kind of critical theory that Adorno still represented but in search of radicalization it drew on Walter Benjamin, who for many was the real hero, and Italian Marxism as represented by Negri, but this was dangerous territory. Through its founder and publisher Peter Gente, along with his partner Heidi Paris, it shaped the New Left in West Germany over several decades. I The Summer of Theory i is a fascinating reconstruction of the German New Left through a reading of one of its iconic publishers and the mission of its pivotal figures, Peter Gente and Heidi Paris. I Minima Moralia i had a transformative effect on German left-wing thought, making Adorno famous, but it also marked a disenchantment with Marxism, which was reflected in Merve's publications. [Extracted from the article]

Jacques Rancière's theorisation of the political has been particularly influential in investigating political struggles and social movements. By distinguishing between the police order – tasked with maintaining the dominant (hierarchical) system – and politics – aiming at breaking that system – Rancière suggests reading the political as a disruptive event. However, he does not specifically engage with the question of how politics affects and changes the police order. This is what this article aims at exploring. Building upon Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I suggest approaching the police order in the same way Kuhn approaches 'normal science' and reading the political in the same way Kuhn reads revolutionary science. I ultimately suggest that Rancière's theorisation of the political is limited because he does not (sufficiently) account for the interplay between police/politics nor for the emergence of an after-politics, that is, a new (ordinary) police order that emerges out of (extraordinary) political events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Burawoy's recent book-length engagement with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu constitutes, at root, a Marxist critique of its inability to conceive of the dominated as anything other than duped and submissive, despite this sitting uneasily with Bourdieu's own research and political practice later in life. Burawoy wonders whether Bourdieusians will be able to recognise the limits of their master's thought, and set about revising and extending it, in the same way as Marxists did of their own master. This article responds by doing precisely that. After clarifying a different reading of misrecognition, symbolic violence and habitus, it draws out a Bourdieusian theory of social change and a 'thicker' conception of contemporary social orders that can accommodate or dissolve Burawoy's arguments while maintaining fundamental separation from the Marxist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case formulation is used in clinical training to weave together theoretical perspectives and support a shared plan of action. Although a cornerstone of clinical practice, critical social theorists have highlighted the risks of depoliticizing political struggles and of reifying and fixing subjects when using psychopathology and case formulation to address situations of injustice. In the field of violent radicalization, this risk is increased by the extreme affects evoked by terror in practitioners and in societies. This article explores the challenges of training clinicians in the field of violent radicalization. It does so by analyzing a Community of Practice (CoP) that was developed to support practitioners involved in this domain of practice in Quebec, Canada. Four focus groups with CoP participants and participant observation of nine CoP meetings were conducted. Thematic and narrative analyses were used to explore the training potential of the CoP and to identify the discursive processes and group dynamics associated with this modality. Results indicate that the diversity of professional perspectives and social positionalities in the group plays a central role in helping participants become aware of their biases and in developing more complex understandings of cases and of their social embedding. Results also suggest that the collective holding of risk is key to preserve practitioners' investment in patients involved with violent radicalization. The sensitive issue of partnership between health and social services and security agencies is also addressed. Results suggest that CoPs with strong leadership allow for experiential training to enhance clinical and critical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its seeming breadth and diversity, the bulk of the personal (mental health) recovery literature has remained strangely 'silent' about the impact of various socio-structural inequalities on the recovery process. Such an inadequacy of the empirical literature is not without consequences since the systematic omission or downplaying, at best, of the socio-structural conditions of living for persons with lived experience of mental health difficulties may inadvertently reinforce a reductionist view of recovery as an atomised, individualised phenomenon. Motivated by those limitations in extant scholarship, a critical literature review was conducted to identify and critique relevant research to problematise the notion of personal recovery in the context of socio-structural disadvantage such as poverty, homelessness, discrimination and inequalities. The review illuminates the scarcity of empirical research and the paucity of sociologically-informed theorisation regarding how recovery is shaped by the socio-structural conditions of living. Those inadequacies are especially pertinent to homelessness research, whereby empirical investigations of personal recovery have remained few and undertheorised. The gaps in the research and theorising about the relational, contextual and socio-structural embeddedness of recovery are distilled. The critical review concludes that personal recovery has remained underresearched, underproblematised and undertheorised, especially in the context of homelessness and other forms of socio-structural disadvantage. Understanding how exclusionary social arrangements affect individuals' recovery, and the coping strategies that they deploy to negotiate those, is likely to inform anti-oppressive interventions that could eventually remove the structural constraints to human emancipation and flourishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harm is a recurring theme in the social sciences. Scholars in a range of empirical areas have documented the deleterious outcomes that at times emerge from social structures, institutions and systems of governance. Yet these harms have often been presented under the rubric of 'unintended consequences'. The outcomes of systems are designed to appear devoid of intentionality, in motion without any clear agency involved, and are thus particularly adept at evading accountability structures and forms of responsibility. Drawing insights from decades of social theory – as well as three illustrative examples from Australia's health, welfare and immigration systems – this article argues that many social structures are in fact intended to cause harm, but designed not to appear so. In presenting this argument, we offer a theoretical framework for conceptualising harm as actively administered. We also challenge scholars from across the social sciences to reconsider the partially depoliticising narrative of 'unintended consequences', and to be bolder in naming the intended harms that permeate social life, often serving powerful political and economic interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johann Arnason's work combines the most erudite historical-comparative sociology, discussing highly knowledgeably enormous stretches of world-history, with the most subtle social and political philosophy, drawing creatively on the traditions of hermeneutics and phenomenology. Invariably, his works introduce more nuance and sophistication into the analysis of even very well studied socio-historical phenomena. At the same time, he addresses such major phenomena in terms of modernity, democracy and capitalism, agreeing that there often – maybe always – is a combination of empirical, conceptual and normative issues at work when analysing human history. Nevertheless, readers of his work may at the same time be impressed by the nuance and sophistication and at a loss with regard to what such further refinement of our socio-historical knowledge entails in terms of understanding our own time in its historical context. Searching through Johann Arnason's work, this article identifies unexplored questions in the conceptual and historical relation between civilization, modernity, and equality and tries to understand why they have been left open. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to offer a reading of Judith Butler's understanding of the precarious, the notion which gives rise to her particular understanding of precarity. The first part of the article discusses the transition from the theory of performativity to the theory of precarity and claims that the body provides the link between a performative act and a precarious life. The second part scrutinizes the idea of the precarious as it appears in conjunction with life. Precariousness and precarity are related to dispossessability and dispossession, and to a politically induced inequality. The article concludes with a claim that the notion of the precarious offers itself as a possible point of departure for an entirely different conceptualization of equality, and as a strong basis for coalitional action or collective struggle. The specific positioning of the body and the political desire for radical equality in Butler's thought makes theories of performativity and precarity interrelated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges that human societies have ever faced. After a late start, it is by now rather intensely debated and analysed also in the social sciences and humanities, though mostly through overly generic explanations in terms of an instrumental relation to nature, of capitalist expansion drives or of the human longing for comfort. In contrast, this article concentrates on the socio-political transformations since the middle of the 20th century, which have been referred to as the 'Great Acceleration' in the use of biophysical resources and in environmental degradation. It provides an analysis of the socio-political mechanisms that brought the resource-intensive path of social development about, showing how Western democratic societies tended to 'solve' difficult social problems by means of a triple displacement: onto other societies; onto nature and the planet; and into the future. As an unintended consequence, this displacement politics led to the globalization of resource-intensive development and to a planetary situation in which, at least as it appears in much of current debate, no further displacement is possible. The article concludes with insights for a more adequate approach to social phenomena of large scale and long duration in social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Bell (1919–2011) and Manuel Castells (1942–) are the grand theorists of the information age. The article provides a detailed, up-to-date, comparative analysis of their writings. It begins with their methodologies, identifying numerous commonalities in their post-Marxian frameworks. The substance of their theories is then examined, where it is shown that both plausibly explain contemporary social reality in terms of the interplay of three forces: the information technology revolution, the restructuring of capitalism and the innovational role of culture. There are found to be major similarities in their accounts (the Kantian interpretation, social stratification) but also significant divergences (role of science, the fourth world, the normative content of culture). Suitably combined, Bell's and Castells's thought goes a long way towards delivering a persuasive sociological theory of the global information society. However, the article concludes by suggesting that extensive further work is needed to clarify the precise relationships between the three factors and their relative weightings in the equations required to explain recent social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The philosophy of Ubuntu has gained momentum in the social work fraternity to the extent that the theme for the World Social Work Day, 2021 celebrations read, 'Ubuntu: I am Because We are – Strengthening Social Solidarity and Global Connectedness'. Through the use of a qualitative research approach, underpinned by a document analysis method, the article initiates a discourse which expounds on the philosophy through the lenses of the IFSW and IASSW 2014 Global Definition of Social Work. Substantially, it proffers justifications that cement the relevance of the Ubuntu philosophy in both the practice and theoretical frameworks of social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discussion of Asger Sørensen's Capitalism, Alienation and Critique ORCID iD Carsten Friberg https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2484-5900 Notes Notes 1 See Asger Sørensen, I Capitalism, Alienation and Critique. This thematic section discusses Asger Sørensen's I Capitalism, Alienation and Critique i ,[1] and in particular the idea of classical Critical Theory that he defends and his critique of political economy. [Extracted from the article]

In this article, I examine the conceptual and methodological points of convergence and divergence of two intellectual currents frequently referred to as the decolonial and ontological turns in social and anthropological theory. Salient points considered are the ways both theoretical projects unsettle modernity's dominant ontological and epistemological foundations by seriously engaging the conceptual potential of thinking with alterity (ethical dimension) and from exteriority (geopolitical dimension). I compare their subversive methodological contributions, examining, in particular, Enrique Dussel's analectical hermeneutic approach and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's ethnographic method of controlled equivocation. Lastly, I discuss how both theories and approaches complement each other's efforts to destabilize Western modernity's philosophical and anthropological foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and the personality disorders. A sample of 475 British adults, aged around 30 years, completed measures of Belief in Conspiracy Theories (CTs) and the Personality Disorders (PDs), as well as the SAPAS, a short intelligence test and two self-evaluations. Belief in CTs was correlated with nearly all PDs, as well as the three established higher order clusters (A: odd and eccentric; B: dramatic and emotional; C: anxious). A series of stepwise multiple regressions were computed. A final regression showed five of the variables (education, intelligence, Cluster A, B, and C) were significant, which indicated that less well-educated and less intelligent participants, scoring higher on two PD clusters (Cluster A and B) but lower on Cluster C, believed more in the CTs. Implications of the study for understanding the origin of CTs is discussed. Limitations of the study, particularly the sample and measures used, are acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines what the rise in machine learning (ML) systems might mean for social theory. Focusing on financial markets, in which algorithmic securities trading founded on ML-based decision-making is gaining traction, I discuss the extent to which established sociological notions remain relevant or demand a reconsideration when applied to an ML context. I argue that ML systems have some capacity for agency and for engaging in forms of collective machine behaviour, in which ML systems interact with other machines. However, ML-based collective machine behaviour is irreducible to human decision-making and thereby challenges established sociological notions of financial markets (including that of embeddedness). I argue that such behaviour can nonetheless be analysed through an adaptation of sociological theories of interaction and collective behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mills' sociological analysis, a central notion is the 'social milieu' which encapsulates 'the social setting of a person that is directly open to his personal experience'. For Mills, sociology should entail an investigation of the set of relations and practices that are a feature of human experience. Understanding the significance of Mills' approach, we argue, requires grasping the way the notion of 'milieu' or 'setting' itself draws upon spatial and topological notions – notions that have become prominent in much contemporary sociological thinking. From this perspective, Mills' work turns out to be relevant as a corrective, both to the undue emphasis on empirical particularity that is evident in some contemporary sociology and to what Mills viewed as 'abstract' theorisation. A large part of the relevance of Mills' work for contemporary sociological problems and challenges is thus to be found in the way his emphasis on situation (or 'place'), as given through the idea of 'milieu', allows a more complex and encompassing approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michael Burawoy's 2021 essay, 'Decolonizing Sociology: The Significance of W.E.B. Du Bois', forges dialogues between the scholar denied and established theorists with the aim of reconstructing the sociological canon. My commentary situates the author's essay and his own Du Boisian turn in a long career dedicated to reflexive science and recomposing theory. I reflect on the seemingly innocuous notion of a dialogue itself: its implications for sociological theory and practice, and how it supports decolonial efforts. Thinking with Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Lisa Lowe, and others, I offer a sketch of a decolonial methodology—what I call a Du Boisian shadowplay—that brings into view the intimate dimensions of imperialism. Ultimately, such a feminist methodology reconstructs dialogues that reflect on researcher standpoints and nested imperial histories; and in the face of today's social crises, nurtures dialogues that are animated by an ethic of love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the (re)production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist-(settler) coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and (ir)rationalities constitutive of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived (despite our losses) and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of (critical) social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being otherwise (in)visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemological-political project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and knowing (non)being of coloniality/modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how growing fears, insecurities and uncertainties during the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted an emotional distance from others. The aim is to explore how global solidarity and nationalism are challenged and constructed as collective emotional processes concerning 'others'. Drawing on social theories of emotions during crises and emotions towards others, this study looks at policy decisions around vaccines and health services and their associated emotions in the context of Korea, which has a relatively small migrant population and a short history of supporting people in lower-income countries. The study finds that the COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened nationalism, both ethnic nationalism and cosmopolitan nationalism. This points to the need to highlight global norms such as human rights and justice and cultivate foundational emotions such as empathy and compassion. This article suggests paying attention to the role of emotions in generating othering practices and developing global solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network concepts are omnipresent in contemporary diagnoses (network society), management practices (network governance), social science methods (network analysis) and theories (network theory). Instigating a critical analysis of network concepts, this article explores the sources and relevance of networks in Foucault's social theory. I argue that via Foucault we can trace network concepts back to cybernetics, a research programme that initiated a shift from 'being' to 'doing' and developed a new theory of regulation based on connectivity and codes, communication and circulation. This insight contributes to two debates: Firstly, it highlights a neglected influence on Foucault's theory that travelled from cybernetics via structuralism and Canguilhem into his concept of power. Secondly, it suggests that network society and governance are neither a product of neoliberalism nor of technological artefacts, such as the Internet. They rather resulted from a distinct tradition of cybernetically inspired theories and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the 'thinning' of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Forrester and Laura Cameron, Freud in Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, 812 pages, ISBN: 9780521861908 In a way having oneself psychoanalysed is like eating from the tree of knowledge. Forrester and Cameron suggest that in using his own dreams as "an occasion for criticizing Freud", Wittgenstein developed a deeper and more profound engagement with Freud than was common amongst other philosophers of the time (p. 337). The key lesson of their discussion is that reading Wittgenstein without the reference to Freud lends "therapy" a kind of corrective or curative sense, one that is at odds with Wittgenstein's own vision. Accordingly, Cavell posits a similarity between Freud's view of analysis and that of Wittgenstein, on the grounds that Wittgenstein also 'seeks to remove something (a temptation, a picture, an illusion of making sense) that meets with resistance' ([3]: 294). [Extracted from the article]

Rahel Jaeggi's theory of alienation has received less attention than her work on forms of life and capitalism. This theory avoids the problems of traditional theories of alienation: objectivism, paternalism, and essentialism. It also sidesteps post-structuralist criticisms of the theory of alienation. However, Jaeggi's theory is flawed in two ways: it is not historically specific, and so cannot explain why alienation is a problem for modernity rather than other historical periods, and it is difficult to connect to social critique. I argue that Karl Marx's later theory of alienation, as interpreted by Moishe Postone and others, is able to avoid the problems that Jaeggi's theory avoids, and is also able to avoid the flaws in her theory. This suggests that critical theory should focus on a theory of capitalism rather than normative social theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pawson and Tilley's acknowledgment of programs embedded in multiple social systems has gained little traction in realist synthesis and evaluation practice. A practice focusing on fairly closed systems—explaining how programs work and do not work—has emerged. This article negotiates the boundaries of knowledge pertinent to have in program design and evaluation from a realist perspective. It highlights critical realism as another possible response to systems thinking in evaluation. Moving one level up a program, it theorizes about social structures, mechanisms, and causes operating in a complex system within which an education-to-work program is nested. Three implications of the approach are highlighted: it foregrounds the relational nature of social, psychological, and programmatic structures and mechanisms; enables policymakers to develop a broader understanding of structures needed to support a program; and enables program architects to ascertain how a planned program might assimilate and adapt to social structures and mechanisms already established in a context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the COVID-19 pandemic, families are having to coordinate their behaviors to face new challenges, such as negotiating the social distancing measures that the family will or will not take in their daily interaction. This study utilizes Family Communication Patterns Theory to examine conversations that young adults reported having with their family members about social distancing measures and what factors predicted the outcomes of these disagreements. A family's level of conversation orientation and the interaction of conversation orientation and conformity orientation predicted change in relational closeness due to the argument and the perceived positivity level of predicted outcome value levels for future interaction with these family members. Additionally, level of conformity orientation predicted perceived relational harm from disagreements about social distancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]