In Dance Cadaverous, Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas argue that the modern social world and modern social theory are foundationally antiblack. Antiblackness, the ontological exclusion inaugurated by racial slavery, persists while social theorists reproduce the exclusion, missing and misrecognizing this profoundly antisocial predicament at the heart of modernity. Across three historical moments—antebellum, Jim Crow, and contemporary—Jung and Vargas offer fundamental critiques of antiblackness, putting under scrutiny humanist and posthumanist social theories, science and technology studies, agency, genocide, racism, people-of-color intersectionality, and environmental justice. Drawing on radical Black study, freedom struggles, and jazz improvisation, they propose antisociology and abolitionist antipolitics as paths forward to provincialize and leave behind the modern social world.

A revelatory account of the ways covert, nefarious relationships between state officials and criminal groups shape daily life for all. 

Far too often, the line between legal and illegal action is crossed by actors and organizations on both sides of the law. From the old Chicago Machine getting rich off criminal activity to Mexican drug cartels placing politicians in office, these relationships between criminals and the government coordinate forms of power in ways that affect where people live, what opportunities they can pursue, how they spend money, and how they treat one another. In Dark Governance, sociologist Javier Auyero describes how this kind of governance works and what it means for civic life. 

Auyero analyzes instances of dark governance, including gangs in Ecuador and paramilitaries in Colombia who exert territorial control through violent specialists and government actors. He then turns to the less-studied case of the “colectivos” in Venezuela to show the scope of political work clandestine connections can achieve by thwarting grassroots organizations. In El Salvador and Honduras, the ties between gang members on the one hand, and politicians and elected officials on the other, serve to illustrate the impact dark governance has on urban spatial arrangements and on electoral campaigns. Dark Governance also offers an in-depth study of police-trafficker collusion in Argentina, which allows Auyero to identify the ways covert connections between state actors and drug traffickers operate in marginalized communities, affecting interpersonal violence. In addition to these examples in Latin America, Auyero also shares case studies in the United States and China. Dark governance can be seen in US organizations that patrol the borders and assert their control over migrants through their illicit connections with state authorities. In China, land expropriation and development projects are sometimes delayed when some households refuse to leave their properties. Enter the thugs-for-hire frequently contracted by local governments across the country to coerce residents into complying with government orders. 

Demonstrating the very real effects of dark governance, Auyero argues that though the organizations involved in these dark arrangements differ, their collaboration results in a singular effect: the ability to control populations. But when these relationships come out of the shadows, collective action can bring them down.

A trenchant analysis of the dark side of regulatory life-making today

In their seemingly relentless pursuit of life, do contemporary U.S. “biocultures”—where biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, hospital, and lab to everyday cultural practices—also engage in a deadly endeavor? Challenging us to question their implications, Deadly Biocultures shows that efforts to “make live” are accompanied by the twin operation of “let die”: they validate and enhance lives seen as economically viable, self-sustaining, productive, and oriented toward the future and optimism while reinforcing inequitable distributions of life based on race, class, gender, and dis/ability. Affirming life can obscure death, create deadly conditions, and even kill.

Deadly Biocultures examines the affirmation to hope, target, thrive, secure, and green in the respective biocultures of cancer, race-based health, fatness, aging, and the afterlife. Its chapters focus on specific practices, technologies, or techniques that ostensibly affirm life and suggest life’s inextricable links to capital but that also engender a politics of death and erasure. The authors ultimately ask: what alternative social forms and individual practices might be mapped onto or intersect with biomedicine for more equitable biofutures?

While the literature on “new institutionalism” explains the stability of institutional arrangements within countries and the divergence of paths of institutional development between countries, Federico Ferrara takes a “historical institutionalist” approach to theorize dynamic processes of institutional reproduction, institutional decay, and institutional change in explaining the development of political institutions. Ferrara synthesizes “power-based” or “power-distributional” explanations and “ideas-based” “legitimation explanations.” He specifies the psychological “microfoundations” of processes of institutional development, drawing heavily from the findings of experimental psychology to ensure that the explanation is grounded in clear and realistic assumptions regarding human motivation, cognition, and behavior. Aside from being of interest to scholars and graduate students in political science and other social-scientific disciplines whose research concentrates on the genesis of political institutions, their evolution over time, and their impact on the stability of political order and the quality of governance, the book will be required reading in graduate courses and seminars in comparative politics where the study of institutions and their development ranks among the subfield’s most important subjects.

Algorithms are a form of productive power – so how may we conceptualise the newly merged terrains of social life, economy and self in a world of digital platforms? How do multiple self-quantifying practices interact with questions of class, race and gender? This edited collection considers algorithms at work – for what purposes encoded data about behaviour, attitudes, dispositions, relationships and preferences are deployed – and black box control, platform society theory and the formation of subjectivities. It details technological structures and lived experience of algorithms and the operation of platforms in areas such as crypto-finance, production, surveillance, welfare, activism in pandemic times. Finally, it asks if platform cooperativism, collaborative design and neomutualism offer new visions. Even as problems with labour and in society mount, subjectivities and counter subjectivities here produced appear as conscious participants of change and not so much the servants of algorithmic control and dominant platforms.

Sociology is living through an epistemological and ethical reckoning. At the center of this intellectual uprising is William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Although long silenced by the discipline’s racist and colonial logics, generations of Black and other critical scholars have ushered a return to, and recovery of, Du Bois’s sociological thought and work. Rather than focusing on his empirical and theoretical contributions to sociology, The Du Boisian Challenge instead grapples with Du Boisian questions of methodology and methods—the intellectual frameworks and normative orientations that guide the questions we pursue, the way we organize and conduct our research, and how we conceive the relationship between theory and data, scholarship and society. Drawing inspiration from Du Bois’s evolving research program, this volume enlists Du Boisian sociologists to reflect on the methodological sensibilities, practices, and commitments that have informed their diverse analyses of racialized modernity and colonial capitalism. These contributors offer indispensable insights to the ongoing conversation about the methodological foundations and potential of contemporary Du Boisian sociology.

Sociology is living through an epistemological and ethical reckoning. At the center of this intellectual uprising is William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Although long silenced by the discipline’s racist and colonial logics, generations of Black and other critical scholars have ushered a return to, and recovery of, Du Bois’s sociological thought and work. Rather than focusing on his empirical and theoretical contributions to sociology, The Du Boisian Challenge instead grapples with Du Boisian questions of methodology and methods—the intellectual frameworks and normative orientations that guide the questions we pursue, the way we organize and conduct our research, and how we conceive the relationship between theory and data, scholarship and society. Drawing inspiration from Du Bois’s evolving research program, this volume enlists Du Boisian sociologists to reflect on the methodological sensibilities, practices, and commitments that have informed their diverse analyses of racialized modernity and colonial capitalism. These contributors offer indispensable insights to the ongoing conversation about the methodological foundations and potential of contemporary Du Boisian sociology.

Sociology is living through an epistemological and ethical reckoning. At the center of this intellectual uprising is William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Although long silenced by the discipline’s racist and colonial logics, generations of Black and other critical scholars have ushered a return to, and recovery of, Du Bois’s sociological thought and work. Rather than focusing on his empirical and theoretical contributions to sociology, The Du Boisian Challenge instead grapples with Du Boisian questions of methodology and methods—the intellectual frameworks and normative orientations that guide the questions we pursue, the way we organize and conduct our research, and how we conceive the relationship between theory and data, scholarship and society. Drawing inspiration from Du Bois’s evolving research program, this volume enlists Du Boisian sociologists to reflect on the methodological sensibilities, practices, and commitments that have informed their diverse analyses of racialized modernity and colonial capitalism. These contributors offer indispensable insights to the ongoing conversation about the methodological foundations and potential of contemporary Du Boisian sociology.