front cover of The Affect Theory Reader 2
The Affect Theory Reader 2
Worldings, Tensions, Futures
Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
Building on the foundational Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect’s resonances with today’s most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Lisa Blackman, Rizvana Bradley, Ann Cvetkovich, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Adam J. Frank, M. Gail Hamner, Omar Kasmani, Cecilia Macón, Hil Malatino, Erin Manning, Derek P. McCormack, Patrick Nickleson, Susanna Paasonen, Tyrone S. Palmer, Carolyn Pedwell, Jasbir K. Puar, Jason Read, Michael Richardson, Dylan Robinson, Tony D. Sampson, Kyla Schuller, Gregory J. Seigworth, Nathan Snaza, Kathleen Stewart, Elizabeth A. Wilson
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Agents of Disorder
Inside China’s Cultural Revolution
Andrew G. Walder
Harvard University Press, 2019

Why did the Chinese party state collapse so quickly after the onset of the Cultural Revolution? The award-winning author of China Under Mao offers a surprising answer that holds a powerful implicit warning for today’s governments.

By May 1966, just seventeen years after its founding, the People’s Republic of China had become one of the most powerfully centralized states in modern history. But that summer everything changed. Mao Zedong called for students to attack intellectuals and officials who allegedly lacked commitment to revolutionary principles. Rebels responded by toppling local governments across the country, ushering in nearly two years of conflict that in places came close to civil war and resulted in nearly 1.6 million dead.

How and why did the party state collapse so rapidly? Standard accounts depict a revolution instigated from the top down and escalated from the bottom up. In this pathbreaking reconsideration of the origins and trajectory of the Cultural Revolution, Andrew Walder offers a startling new conclusion: party cadres seized power from their superiors, setting off a chain reaction of violence, intensified by a mishandled army intervention. This inside-out dynamic explains how virulent factions formed, why the conflict escalated, and why the repression that ended the disorder was so much worse than the violence it was meant to contain.

Based on over 2,000 local annals chronicling some 34,000 revolutionary episodes across China, Agents of Disorder offers an original interpretation of familiar but complex events and suggests a broader lesson for our times: forces of order that we count on to stanch violence can instead generate devastating bloodshed.

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American Community
Radical Experiments in Intentional Living
Mark S. Ferrara
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Mainstream notions of the “American Dream” usually revolve around the ownership of private property, a house of one’s own. Yet for the past 400 years, a large number of Americans have dared to dream bigger and bolder, choosing to live in intentional communities that pooled resources, and they worked to ensure the well-being of all their members. 
 
American Community takes us inside forty of the most interesting intentional communities in the nation’s history, from the colonial era to the present day. You will learn about such little-known experiments in cooperative living as the Icarian communities, which took the utopian ideas expounded in a 1840 French novel and put them into practice, ultimately spreading to five states over fifty years. Plus, it covers more recent communities such as Arizona’s Arcosanti, designed by architect Paolo Soleri as a model for ecologically sustainable living.
 
In this provocative and engaging book, Mark Ferrara guides readers through an array of intentional communities that boldly challenged capitalist economic arrangements in order to attain ideals of harmony, equality, and social justice. By shining a light on these forgotten histories, it shows that far from being foreign concepts, communitarianism and socialism have always been vital parts of the American experience.
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The Anarchist Roots of Geography
Toward Spatial Emancipation
Simon Springer
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

The Anarchist Roots of Geography sets the stage for a radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. By embracing anarchist geographies as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for nonhierarchical connections between autonomous entities, Simon Springer configures a new political imagination.

Experimentation in and through space is the story of humanity’s place on the planet, and the stasis and control that now supersede ongoing organizing experiments are an affront to our survival. Singular ontological modes that favor one particular way of doing things disavow geography by failing to understand the spatial as a mutable assemblage intimately bound to temporality. Even worse, such stagnant ideas often align to the parochial interests of an elite minority and thereby threaten to be our collective undoing. What is needed is the development of new relationships with our world and, crucially, with each other. 

By infusing our geographies with anarchism we unleash a spirit of rebellion that foregoes a politics of waiting for change to come at the behest of elected leaders and instead engages new possibilities of mutual aid through direct action now. We can no longer accept the decaying, archaic geographies of hierarchy that chain us to statism, capitalism, gender domination, racial oppression, and imperialism. We must reorient geographical thinking towards anarchist horizons of possibility. Geography must become beautiful, wherein the entirety of its embrace is aligned to emancipation.

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Anonymous
The Performance of Hidden Identities
Thomas DeGloma
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A rich sociological analysis of how and why we use anonymity.
 
In recent years, anonymity has rocked the political and social landscape. There are countless examples: An anonymous whistleblower was at the heart of President Trump’s first impeachment, an anonymous group of hackers compromised more than 77 million Sony accounts, and best-selling author Elena Ferrante resolutely continued to hide her real name and identity. In Anonymous, Thomas DeGloma draws on a fascinating set of contemporary and historical cases to build a sociological theory that accounts for the many faces of anonymity. He asks a number of pressing questions about the social conditions and effects of anonymity. What is anonymity, and why, under various circumstances, do individuals act anonymously? How do individuals accomplish anonymity? How do they use it, and, in some situations, how is it imposed on them?
 
To answer these questions, DeGloma tackles anonymity thematically, dedicating each chapter to a distinct type of anonymous action, including ones he dubs protective, subversive, institutional, and ascribed. Ultimately, he argues that anonymity and pseudonymity are best understood as performances in which people obscure personal identities as they make meaning for various audiences. As they bring anonymity and pseudonymity to life, DeGloma shows, people work to define the world around them to achieve different goals and objectives.
 
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Anthropology and Social Theory
Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject
Sherry B. Ortner
Duke University Press, 2006
In Anthropology and Social Theory the award-winning anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner draws on her longstanding interest in theories of cultural practice to rethink key concepts of culture, agency, and subjectivity for the social sciences of the twenty-first century. The seven theoretical and interpretive essays in this volume each advocate reconfiguring, rather than abandoning, the concept of culture. Similarly, they all suggest that a theory which depends on the interested action of social beings—specifically practice theory, associated especially with the work of Pierre Bourdieu—requires a more developed notion of human agency and a richer conception of human subjectivity. Ortner shows how social theory must both build upon and move beyond classic practice theory in order to understand the contemporary world.

Some of the essays reflect explicitly on theoretical concerns: the relationship between agency and power, the problematic quality of ethnographic studies of resistance, and the possibility of producing an anthropology of subjectivity. Others are ethnographic studies that apply Ortner’s theoretical framework. In these, she investigates aspects of social class, looking at the relationship between race and middle-class identity in the United States, the often invisible nature of class as a cultural identity and as an analytical category in social inquiry, and the role that public culture and media play in the creation of the class anxieties of Generation X. Written with Ortner’s characteristic lucidity, these essays constitute a major statement about the future of social theory from one of the leading anthropologists of our time.

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The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution
Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy
Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath
Harvard University Press, 2022

“Eminently readable, and anybody who cares about the future of American democracy in these perilous times can only hope that it will be widely read and carefully considered.”
—James Pope, Washington Post

“Fishkin and Forbath’s accessible work serves as both history lesson and political playbook, offering the Left an underutilized—and perhaps counterintuitive—tool in the present-day fight against social and economic injustice: the Constitution.”
—Benjamin Morse, Jacobin

“Aims to recover the Constitution’s pivotal role in shaping claims of justice and equality…in engaging, imaginative prose that makes even the present court’s capture by the ideological right a compelling platform for a revived social-democratic constitutional politics.”
New Republic

Oligarchy is a threat to the American republic. When too much economic and political power is concentrated in too few hands, we risk losing the “republican form of government” the Constitution requires. Today, courts enforce the Constitution as if it had almost nothing to say about this threat. But as this revolutionary retelling of constitutional history shows, a commitment to prevent oligarchy once stood at the center of a robust tradition in American political and constitutional thought.

Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath demonstrate that reformers, legislators, and even judges working in this “democracy-of-opportunity” tradition understood that the Constitution imposes a duty on legislatures to thwart oligarchy and promote a broad distribution of wealth and political power. These ideas led Jacksonians to fight special economic privileges for the few, Populists to try to break up monopoly power, and Progressives to battle for the constitutional right to form a union.

But today, as we enter a new Gilded Age, this tradition in progressive American economic and political thought lies dormant. The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution begins the work of recovering it and exploring its profound implications for our deeply unequal society and badly damaged democracy.

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Aníbal Quijano
Foundational Essays on the Coloniality of Power
Anibal Quijano. Edited by Walter D. Mignolo, Rita Segato, and Catherine E. Walsh
Duke University Press, 2024
The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano is widely considered to be a foundational figure of the decolonial perspective grounded in three basic concepts: coloniality, coloniality of power, and the colonial matrix of power. His decolonial theorizations of these three concepts have transformed the principles and assumptions of the very idea of knowledge, impacted the social sciences and humanities, and questioned the myth of rationality in natural sciences. The essays in this volume encompass nearly thirty years of Quijano’s work, bringing them to an English-reading audience for the first time. This volume is not simply an introduction to Quijano’s work; it achieves one of his unfulfilled goals: to write a book that contains his main hypotheses, concepts, and arguments. In this regard, the collection encourages a fuller understanding and broader implementation of the analyses and concepts that he developed over the course of his long career. Moreover, it demonstrates that the tools for reading and dismantling coloniality originated outside the academy in Latin America and the former Third World.
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Approaches to Social Theory
Stewart Lindenberg
Russell Sage Foundation, 1986
Many social scientists lament the increasing fragmentation of their discipline, the trend toward specialization and away from engagement with overarching issues. Opportunities to transcend established subdisciplinary boundaries are rare, but the extraordinary conference that gave rise to this volume was one such occasion. The W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki Memorial Conference on Social Theory, held at the University of Chicago, brought together an outstanding array of scholars representing a variety of contending approaches to social theory. In panels, presentations, and general discussions, these scholars confronted one another in the context of an entire range of approaches. But as readers of this deftly edited collection will discover, the conference was more than a forum for abstract theoretical debate. These papers and discussions represent original scholarly contributions that exemplify orientations to social theory by examining real problems in the functioning of society—from large-scale economic growth and decline to the dynamics of interpersonal interaction. By exploring a few central issues in different ways, this unique conference worked through some lively theoretical incompatibilities and established genuine potential for communication, for complementary and collaborative effort at the core of sociology. The excitement of that dialogue, and the intellectual vitality it generated, are captured for the reader in Approaches to Social Theory. "Meaty presentations and confrontations of ideas by people whose views we respect...Recommended to anyone interested in the current state of social theory." —Contemporary Sociology
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Between Us
Healing Ourselves and Changing the World Through Sociology
Edited by Marika Lindholm and Elizabeth Anne Wood
University of Chicago Press, 2024
This heartfelt collection is a testament to sociology’s power to heal people and transform societies.
 
The world is a tough place right now. Climate change, income inequality, racist violence, and the erosion of democracy have exposed the vulnerability of our individual and collective futures. But as the sociologists gathered here by Marika Lindholm and Elizabeth Wood show, no matter how helpless we might feel, it’s vital that we discover new paths toward healing and change. The short, accessible, emotionally and intellectually powerful essays in Between Us offer a transformative new way to think about sociology and its ability to fuel personal and social change. These forty-five essays reflect a diverse range of experiences. Whether taking an adult son with autism grocery shopping or fighting fires in Barcelona, contending with sexism at the beach or facing racism at a fertility clinic, celebrating one’s immigrant heritage, or acknowledging one’s KKK ancestors, this book shows students that sociology is deeply rooted in everyday life and can be used to help us process and understand it. A perfect introduction to the discipline and why it matters, Between Us will resonate with students from all backgrounds as they embark on their academic journey.
 
 
 
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Brutalism
Achille Mbembe
Duke University Press, 2024
In Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic. Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.
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Civilization
Contents, Discontents, Malcontents, and Other Essays in Social Theory
Stanford Lyman
University of Arkansas Press, 1990

In order to bring sociology to the recognition of a social world of contingencies and of an obdurate but protean reality that changes shapes as humans define it, Stanford Lyman re-introduces the concept of “civilization,” employing it as both an intellectual resource and a proper topic for sociological investigations.

The fifteen essays in this collection by one of America’s premier sociologists reflect Lyman’s concern with all that is meant by the term civilization. Primarily inspired by his attempts to synthesize the ideas of Erving Goffman, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Herbert Blumer, and other social thinkers, the essays reflect the author’s abiding interest in the structures and the processes attending race relations, minority communities, and the constitution of the social self.

1991 Mid-South Sociological Association Book Award
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The Class Matrix
Social Theory after the Cultural Turn
Vivek Chibber
Harvard University Press, 2022

“A quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn’t clear how culturalists—especially the anti-Marxist ones—can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is.”—Chris Wright, CounterPunch

“Chibber…has developed a sophisticated, elegant, and readable defense of the sociological significance of class structure in understanding and addressing the key problems inherent in capitalism.”—Choice

“[A] clear, compelling, and systematic statement of the view that class is an objective reality that predictably and rationally shapes human thought and action, one we need to grapple with seriously if we’re to comprehend contemporary society and its morbid symptoms.”—Jacobin

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, theorists argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture—that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival.

Chibber accommodates the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework, showing how one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. He vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain, while also explaining that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors.

The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations.”

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Communication Culture in a Digital Age
Being Seriously Relational
Cristian Mendoza
St. Augustine's Press, 2023
Why are human beings so attracted to information and communication technologies? Developments in this field have formed new social networks around these technologies and that seem to compete with pre-existing structures in human lives. Cristian Mendoza and Lluís Clavell confront this phenomenon and its effect on human happiness, but have no desire to condemn the trajectory of human reliance on communication technology. Rather, they see an opportunity to explore human nature at greater depths. Only in this way can our use of technology properly support human activity and not sabotage our grasp of reality. 

Mendoza and Clavell's treatment of this topic renders an important philosophical conversation about digital realities and how they can actually make human life more human. This book provides a framework for using human attraction to information and communication tech for human benefit. It can be done! The authors apply the work of old and new masters to help open the new horizons of communication technology wherein human beings can flourish.
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Communities of Health Care Justice
Galarneau, Charlene
Rutgers University Press, 2016
The factions debating health care reform in the United States have gravitated toward one of two positions: that just health care is an individual responsibility or that it must be regarded as a national concern. Both arguments overlook a third possibility: that justice in health care is multilayered and requires the participation of multiple and diverse communities. 
 
Communities of Health Care Justice makes a powerful ethical argument for treating communities as critical moral actors that play key roles in defining and upholding just health policy. Drawing together the key community dimensions of health care, and demonstrating their neglect in most prominent theories of health care justice, Charlene Galarneau postulates the ethical norms of community justice. In the process, she proposes that while the subnational communities of health care justice are defined by shared place, including those bound by culture, religion, gender, and race that together they define justice. 
 
As she constructs her innovative theorization of health care justice, Galarneau also reveals its firm grounding in the work of real-world health policy and community advocates. Communities of Health Care Justice not only strives to imagine a new framework of just health care, but also to show how elements of this framework exist in current health policy, and to outline the systemic, conceptual, and structural changes required to put these justice norms into fuller practice.
 
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The Community in Rural America
Kenneth P. Wilkinson
University Press of Colorado, 2022
The Community in Rural America, by Kenneth P. Wilkinson, is a foundational theoretical work that both defines the interactional approach to the study of the community in rural areas and frames its application to encourage and promote rural community development. Recognized for its detailed theoretical construction and logic for understanding human interactions, this book has been widely adopted and used by researchers, extension faculty, and community development practitioners for over thirty years. Presenting Wilkinson’s groundbreaking work in its original form, with a new foreword aimed at clarifying several key concepts in interactional theory, this edition of The Community in Rural America will appeal to new students of the community as well as established scholars in the field.
 
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A Critical Synergy
Race, Decoloniality, and World Crises
Meghji, Ali
Temple University Press, 2023
Practitioners of decolonial theory and critical race theory (CRT) often use one or the other, but not both. In his provocative book, A Critical Synergy, Ali Meghji suggests using the two theories in tandem rather than attempting to hierarchize or synthesize them. Doing so allows for the study of social phenomena in a way that captures their global and historical roots, while acknowledging their local, national, and contemporary particularities.

The differences between decolonial thought and CRT, Meghji insists, does not necessarily imply one approach is stronger. Rather, he asserts, they often provide alternative but not incompatible viewpoints of the same social problem. Meghji presents case studies of capitalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate crisis, and twenty-first-century far-right populism to show that with both theories, we can understand more, as insights may be lost by using only one.

Meghji is not calling for a universal theoretical synthesis in A Critical Synergy, but rather a practice that can help open sociology and social science to the tradition of pluriversality much more broadly.
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Cultures of Resistance
Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age
Heidi Reynolds-Stenson
Rutgers University Press, 2022

Cultures of Resistance provides new insight on a long-standing question: whether government efforts to repress social movements produce a chilling effect on dissent, or backfire and spur greater mobilization. In recent decades, the U.S. government’s repressive capacity has expanded dramatically, as the legal, technological, and bureaucratic tools wielded by agents of the state have become increasingly powerful. Today, more than ever, it is critical to understand how repression impacts the freedom to dissent and collectively express political grievances. Through analysis of activists’ rich and often deeply moving experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers key group processes that shape how individuals understand, experience, and weigh these risks of participating in collective action. Qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate that, following experiences of state repression, the achievement or breakdown of these group processes, not the type or severity of repression experienced, best explain why some individuals persist while others disengage. In doing so, the book bridges prevailing theoretical divides in social movement research by illuminating how individual rationality is collectively constructed, mediated, and obscured by protest group culture.

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Deadly Biocultures
The Ethics of Life-making
Nadine Ehlers
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

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?

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The Development of Political Institutions
Power, Legitimacy, Democracy
Federico Ferrara
University of Michigan Press, 2022

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.

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Disconnect
Facebook's Affective Bonds
Tero Karppi
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

An urgent examination of the threat posed to social media by user disconnection, and the measures websites will take to prevent it


No matter how pervasive and powerful social media websites become, users always have the option of disconnecting—right? Not exactly, as Tero Karppi reveals in this disquieting book. Pointing out that platforms like Facebook see disconnection as an existential threat—and have undertaken wide-ranging efforts to eliminate it—Karppi argues that users’ ability to control their digital lives is gradually dissipating. 

Taking a nonhumancentric approach, Karppi explores how modern social media platforms produce and position users within a system of coded relations and mechanisms of power. For Facebook, disconnection is an intense affective force. It is a problem of how to keep users engaged with the platform, but also one of keeping value, attention, and desires within the system. Karppi uses Facebook’s financial documents as a map to navigate how the platform sees its users. Facebook’s plans to connect the entire globe through satellites and drones illustrates the material webs woven to keep us connected. Karppi analyzes how Facebook’s interface limits the opportunity to opt-out—even continuing to engage users after their physical death. Showing how users have fought to take back their digital lives, Karppi chronicles responses like Web2.0 Suicide Machine, an art project dedicated to committing digital suicide. 

For Karppi, understanding social media connectivity comes from unbinding the bonds that stop people from leaving these platforms. Disconnection brings us to the limit of user policies, algorithmic control, and platform politics. Ultimately, Karppi’s focus on the difficulty of disconnection, rather than the ease of connection, reveals how social media has come to dominate human relations.

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Economy and Society
A New Translation
Edited and translated by Keith Tribe
Harvard University Press, 2019

The definitive new translation of Max Weber’s classic work of social theory—arguably the most important book by the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century.

Max Weber’s Economy and Society is the foundational text for the social sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, presenting a framework for understanding the relations among individual action, social action, economic action, and economic institutions. It also provides a classification of political forms based upon “systems of rule” and “rulership” that has shaped debate about the nature and role of charisma, tradition, legal authority, and bureaucracy.

Keith Tribe’s major new translation presents Economy and Society as it stood when Weber died in June 1920, with three complete chapters and a fragment of a fourth. One of the English-speaking world’s leading experts on Weber’s thought, Tribe has produced a uniquely clear and faithful translation that balances accuracy with readability. He adds to this a substantial introduction and commentary that reflect the new Weber scholarship of the past few decades.

This new edition will become the definitive translation of one of the few indisputably great intellectual works of the past 150 years.

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Education for Democracy
Renewing the Wisconsin Idea
Edited by Chad Alan Goldberg
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
American public universities were founded in a civic tradition that differentiated them from their European predecessors—steering away from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Like many such higher education institutions across the United States, the University of Wisconsin’s mission, known as the Wisconsin Idea, emphasizes a responsibility to serve the needs of the state and its people. This commitment, which necessarily requires a pledge to academic freedom, has recently been openly threatened by state and federal actors seeking to dismantle a democratic and expansive conception of public service.

Using the Wisconsin Idea as a lens, Education for Democracy argues that public higher education institutions remain a bastion of collaborative problem solving. Examinations of partnerships between the state university and people of the state highlight many crucial and lasting contributions to issues of broad public concern such as conservation, LGBTQ+ rights, and poverty alleviation. The contributors restore the value of state universities and humanities education as a public good, contending that they deserve renewed and robust support.
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Emergency
COVID-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life
Claire Laurier Decoteau
University of Chicago Press
A forceful critique of how and why states failed to protect marginalized communities in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of ignoring the existing emergencies that exacerbated the pandemic’s devastating effects.
 
The COVID-19 pandemic inaugurated a state of emergency unprecedented for most Americans. Some could observe this emergency from the relative safety of their homes by working remotely, conducting routine medical appointments over video calls, and getting groceries by delivery. At the same time, those in marginalized communities got sick and died without access to the same privileges, sometimes even at the expense of others. After all, someone had to ship goods from warehouses, someone had to clean the hospital, and someone had to shelve and deliver groceries.
 
In this book, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau attempts to document and theorize the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped those experiences. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the United States economy. As Decoteau shows, the city’s “racial equity” project attempted to manage these converging emergencies by building up epistemic infrastructure and manipulating epidemiological data. City officials used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. The city focused on the urgent and spectacular while ignoring the long-term disinvestment in marginalized communities, including healthcare resources. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.
 
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Emergency
Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis
Edgar Garcia
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Nine short essays exploring the K’iche’ Maya story of creation, the Popol Vuh.
 
Written during the lockdown in Chicago in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, these essays consider the Popol Vuh as a work that was also written during a time of feverish social, political, and epidemiological crisis as Spanish missionaries and colonial military deepened their conquest of indigenous peoples and cultures in Mesoamerica. What separates the Popol Vuh from many other creation texts is the disposition of the gods engaged in creation. Whereas the book of Genesis is declarative in telling the story of the world’s creation, the Popol Vuh is interrogative and analytical: the gods, for example, question whether people actually need to be created, given the many perfect animals they have already placed on earth.
 
Emergency uses the historical emergency of the Popol Vuh to frame the ongoing emergencies of colonialism that have surfaced all too clearly in the global health crisis of COVID-19. In doing so, these essays reveal how the authors of the Popol Vuh—while implicated in deep social crisis—nonetheless insisted on transforming emergency into scenes of social, political, and intellectual emergence, translating crisis into creativity and world creation.
 
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Fear Of A Queer Planet
Queer Politics and Social Theory
Michael Warner
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

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Foundations of Social Theory
James Coleman
Harvard University Press

Combining principles of individual rational choice with a sociological conception of collective action, James Coleman recasts social theory in a bold new way. The result is a landmark in sociological theory, capable of describing both stability and change in social systems.

This book provides for the first time a sound theoretical foundation for linking the behavior of individuals to organizational behavior and then to society as a whole. The power of the theory is especially apparent when Coleman analyzes corporate actors, such as large corporations and trade unions. He examines the creation of these institutions, collective decision making, and the processes through which authority is revoked in revolts and revolutions.

Coleman discusses the problems of holding institutions responsible for their actions as well as their incompatibility with the family. He also provides a simple mathematical analysis corresponding to and carrying further the verbal formulations of the theory. Finally, he generates research techniques that will permit quantitative testing of the theory.

From a simple, unified conceptual structure Coleman derives, through elegant chains of reasoning, an encompassing theory of society. It promises to be the most important contribution to social theory since the publication of Talcott Parsons' Structure of Social Action in 1936.

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From Albert Salomon
Essays on Social Thinkers
Robert Jackall
University of Tennessee Press, 2019
Albert Salomon (1891-1966) was an eminent German-Jewish sociologist. He studiedart history, religious history, and philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin;philosophy at the University of Freiburg; and sociology at the University of Heidelberg. At Heidelberg, he studied under Max Weber, Georg Lukács, and Karl Mannheim. His fellow students included, among other great social thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Hans Speier. After obtaining his doctorate in sociology under Mannheim, he taught at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, but lost his job there when the Nazis came to power in January 1933. He received an offer from Alvin Johnson to teach at the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research and, with his family, migrated to New York City in early 1935.Over the years, Salomon taught many courses in the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School, including seminars on Weber, Durkheim, the history of social thought, and Balzac as a sociologist. His students revered him for his breadth and depth of learning and his exacting standards. Later scholars, including the editors of From Albert Salomon: Essays on Social Thinkers, regard him as one of the most important interpreters of Western thought and as an exemplar of the great Jewish intellectual tradition.
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Habit's Pathways
Repetition, Power, Conduct
Tony Bennett
Duke University Press, 2023
Habit has long preoccupied a wide range of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In Habit’s Pathways Tony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct. Bennett considers habit’s uses and effects across the monastic regimens of medieval Europe, in plantation slavery and the factory system, through colonial forms of rule, and within a range of medicalized pathologies. He brings these episodes in habit’s political histories to bear on contemporary debates ranging from its role in relation to the politics of white supremacy to the digital harvesting of habits in practices of algorithmic governance. Throughout, Bennett tracks how habit’s repetitions have been articulated differently across divisions of class, race, and gender, demonstrating that although habit serves as an apparatus for achieving success, self-fulfillment, and freedom for the powerful, it has simultaneously served as a means of control over women, racialized peoples, and subordinate classes.
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A History of Navajo Nation Education
Disentangling Our Sovereign Body
Wendy Shelly Greyeyes; Foreword by Kevin K. Washburn
University of Arizona Press, 2022
A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body unravels the tangle of federal and state education programs that have been imposed on Navajo people and illuminates the ongoing efforts by tribal communities to transfer state authority over Diné education to the Navajo Nation.

On the heels of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Diné Education, this important education history explains how the current Navajo educational system is a complex terrain of power relationships, competing agendas, and jurisdictional battles influenced by colonial pressures and tribal resistance. An iron grip of colonial domination over Navajo education remains, thus inhibiting a unified path toward educational sovereignty. In providing the historical roots to today’s challenges, Wendy Shelly Greyeyes clears the path and provides a go-to reference to move discussions forward.
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The Human Condition
Second Edition
Hannah Arendt
University of Chicago Press, 2018
The past year has seen a resurgence of interest in the political thinker Hannah Arendt, “the theorist of beginnings,” whose work probes the logics underlying unexpected transformations—from totalitarianism to revolution.

A work of striking originality, The Human Condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then—diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox that as human powers increase through technological and humanistic inquiry, we are less equipped to control the consequences of our actions—continue to confront us today. This new edition, published to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of its original publication, contains Margaret Canovan’s 1998 introduction and a new foreword by Danielle Allen.

A classic in political and social theory, The Human Condition is a work that has proved both timeless and perpetually timely.
 
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Human Nature Debate
Social Theory, Social Policy and the Caring Professions
Harry Cowen
Pluto Press, 1994

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Human Organizations and Social Theory
Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Adaptation
Murray J. Leaf
University of Illinois Press, 2008

In the 1930s, George Herbert Mead and other leading social scientists established the modern empirical analysis of social interaction and communication, enabling theories of cognitive development, language acquisition, interaction, government, law and legal processes, and the social construction of the self. However, they could not provide a comparably empirical analysis of human organization. 

The theory in this book fills in the missing analysis of organizations and specifies more precisely the pragmatic analysis of communication with an adaptation of information theory to ordinary unmediated communications. The study also provides the theoretical basis for understanding the success of pragmatically grounded public policies, from the New Deal through the postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan to the ongoing development of the European Union, in contrast to the persistent failure of positivistic and Marxist policies and programs.

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Humanity's Last Stand
Confronting Global Catastrophe
Mark Schuller
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Are we as a species headed towards extinction? As our economic system renders our planet increasingly inhospitable to human life, powerful individuals fight over limited resources, and racist reaction to migration strains the social fabric of many countries. How can we retain our humanity in the midst of these life-and-death struggles?
 
Humanity’s Last Stand dares to ask these big questions, exploring the interconnections between climate change, global capitalism, xenophobia, and white supremacy. As it unearths how capitalism was born from plantation slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous people, it also invites us to imagine life after capitalism. The book teaches its readers how to cultivate an anthropological imagination, a mindset that remains attentive to local differences even as it identifies global patterns of inequality and racism.
 
Surveying the struggles of disenfranchised peoples around the globe from frontline communities affected by climate change, to #BlackLivesMatter activists, to Indigenous water protectors, to migrant communities facing increasing hostility, anthropologist Mark Schuller argues that we must develop radical empathy in order to move beyond simply identifying as “allies” and start acting as “accomplices.” Bringing together the insights of anthropologists and activists from many cultures, this timely study shows us how to stand together and work toward a more inclusive vision of humanity before it’s too late.

More information and instructor resources (https://humanityslaststand.org)
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Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005
Jeffery M. Paige
University of Arizona Press, 2020

Uprisings by indigenous peoples of Ecuador and Bolivia between 1990 and 2005 overthrew the five-hundred-year-old racial and class order inherited from the Spanish Empire. It started in Ecuador with the Great Indigenous Uprising, which was fought for cultural and economic rights. A few years later massive indigenous mobilizations began in Bolivia, culminating in 2005 with the election of Evo Morales, the first indigenous president.

Jeffrey M. Paige, an internationally recognized authority on the sociology of revolutionary movements, interviewed forty-five indigenous leaders who were actively involved in the uprisings. The leaders recount how peaceful protest and electoral democracy paved the path to power. Through the interviews, we learn how new ideologies of indigenous socialism drew on the deep commonalities between the communal dreams of their ancestors and the modern ideology of democratic socialism. This new discourse spoke to the people most oppressed by both withering racism and neoliberal capitalism.

Emphasizing mutual respect among ethnic groups (including the dominant Hispanic group), the new revolutionary dynamic proposes a communal worldview similar to but more inclusive than Western socialism because it adds indigenous cultures and nature in a spiritual whole. Although absent in the major revolutions of the past century, the themes of indigenous revolution—democracy, indigeneity, spirituality, community, and ecology—are critically important.

Paige’s interviews present the powerful personal experiences and emotional intensity of the revolutionary leadership. They share the stories of mass mobilization, elections, and indigenous socialism that created a new form of twenty-first-century revolution with far-reaching applications beyond the Andes.

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The Inner Life of Race
Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power
Leerom Medovoi
Duke University Press, 2024

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Leftist Theories of Sport
A Critique and Reconstruction
William J. Morgan
University of Illinois Press, 1994
The degradation of modern sport--its commercialization, trivialization, widespread cheating, cult of athletic stars and celebrities, and manipulation by the media--has led to calls for its transformation. William J. Morgan constructs a critical theory of sport that shores up the weak arguments of past attempts and points a way forward to making sport more humane, compelling, and substantive. Drawing on the work of social theorists, Morgan challenges scholars and fans alike to explore new spaces in sport culture and imagine the rich cultural and political possibilities to be found in the pastimes we follow with such passion.
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Logics of History
Social Theory and Social Transformation
William H. Sewell Jr.
University of Chicago Press, 2005
While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians.

Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.
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Making History / Making Blintzes
How Two Red Diaper Babies Found Each Other and Discovered America
Flacks, Mickey
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Making History/Making Blintzes is a chronicle of the political and personal lives of progressive activists Richard (Dick) and Miriam (Mickey) Flacks, two of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As active members of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, and leaders in today’s social movements, their stories are a first-hand account of progressive American activism from the 1960s to the present. 

Throughout this memoir, the couple demonstrates that their lifelong commitment to making history through social activism cannot be understood without returning to the deeply personal context of their family history—of growing up “Red Diaper babies” in 1950s New York City, using folk music as self-expression as adolescents in the 1960s, and of making blintzes for their own family through the 1970s and 1980s. As the children of immigrants and first generation Jews, Dick and Mickey crafted their own religious identity as secular Jews, created a critical space for American progressive activism through SDS, and ultimately, found themselves raising an “American” family.  
 
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Mikhail Bakhtin
The Duvakin Interviews, 1973
Slav N Gratchev
Bucknell University Press, 2019
Whenever Bakhtin, in his final decade, was queried about writing his memoirs, he shrugged it off. Unlike many of his Symbolist generation, Bakhtin was not fascinated by his own self-image. This reticence to tell his own story was the point of access for Viktor Duvakin, Mayakovsky scholar, fellow academic, and head of an oral history project, who in 1973 taped six interviews with Bakhtin over twelve hours. They remain our primary source of Bakhtin’s personal views:  on formative moments in his education and exile, his reaction to the Revolution, his impressions of political, intellectual, and theatrical figures during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and his non-conformist opinions on Russian and Soviet poets and musicians. Bakhtin's passion for poetic language and his insights into music also come as a surprise to readers of his essays on the novel. One remarkable thread running through the conversations is Bakhtin's love of poetry, masses of which he knew by heart in several languages. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973, translated and annotated here from the complete transcript of the tapes, offers a fuller, more flexible image of Bakhtin than we could have imagined beneath his now famous texts.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Model Cases
On Canonical Research Objects and Sites
Monika Krause
University of Chicago Press, 2021

In Model Cases, Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease.  Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.
 
 Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.
 


 
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Moral Minefields
How Sociologists Debate Good Science
Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An analysis of the effects of moral debates on sociological research.

Few academic disciplines are as contentious as sociology. Sociologists routinely turn on their peers with fierce criticisms not only of their empirical rigor and theoretical clarity but of their character as well. Yet despite the controversy, scholars manage to engage in thorny debates without being censured. How?
 
In Moral Minefields, Shai M. Dromi and Samuel D. Stabler consider five recent controversial topics in sociology—race and genetics, secularization theory, methodological nationalism, the culture of poverty, and parenting practices—to reveal how moral debates affect the field. Sociologists, they show, tend to respond to moral criticism of scholarly work in one of three ways. While some accept and endorse the criticism, others work out new ways to address these topics that can transcend the criticism, while still others build on the debates to form new, more morally acceptable research.
 
Moral Minefields addresses one of the most prominent questions in contemporary sociological theory: how can sociology contribute to the development of a virtuous society? Rather than suggesting that sociologists adopt a clear paradigm that can guide their research toward neatly defined moral aims, Dromi and Stabler argue that sociologists already largely possess and employ the repertoires to address questions of moral virtue in their research. The conversation thus is moved away from attempts to theorize the moral goods sociologists should support and toward questions about how sociologists manage the plurality of moral positions that present themselves in their studies. Moral diversity within sociology, they show, fosters disciplinary progress. 
 
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More Than Pretty Boxes
How the Rise of Professional Organizing Shows Us the Way We Work Isn’t Working
Carrie M. Lane
University of Chicago Press
This study of the female-led industry of professional organizers helps us understand—and perhaps alleviate—the overwhelming demands society places on our time and energy.

For a widely dreaded, often mundane task, organizing one’s possessions has taken a surprising hold on our cultural imagination. Today, those with the means can hire professionals to help sort and declutter their homes. In More Than Pretty Boxes, Carrie M. Lane introduces us to this world of professional organizers and offers new insight into the domains of work and home, forever entangled—especially for women.

The female-dominated organizing profession didn’t have a name until the 1980s, but it is now the subject of countless reality shows, podcasts, and magazines. Lane draws on interviews with organizers, including many of the field’s founders, to trace the profession’s history and uncover its enduring appeal to those seeking meaningful, flexible, self-directed work. Taking readers behind the scenes of real-life organizing sessions, More Than Pretty Boxes details the strategies organizers use to help people part with their belongings, and it also explores the intimate, empathetic relationships that can form between clients and organizers.

But perhaps most importantly, More Than Pretty Boxes helps us think through a tangled set of questions around neoliberal work arrangements, overconsumption, emotional connection, and the deeply gendered nature of paid and unpaid work. Ultimately, Lane situates organizing at the center of contemporary conversations around how work isn’t working anymore and makes a case for organizing’s radical potential to push back against the overwhelming demands of work and the home, too often placed on women’s shoulders. Organizers aren’t the sole answer to this crisis, but their work can help us better understand both the nature of the problem and the sorts of solace, support, and solutions that might help ease it.
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The Nature of Space
Milton Santos
Duke University Press, 2021
In The Nature of Space, pioneering Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos attends to globalization writ large and how local and global orders intersect in the construction of space. Santos offers a theory of human space based on relationships between time and ontology. He argues that when geographers consider the inseparability of time and space, they can then transcend fragmented realities and partial truths without trying to theorize their way around them. Based on these premises, Santos examines the role of space, which he defines as indissoluble systems of objects and systems of actions in social processes, while providing a geographic contribution to the production of a critical social theory.
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Nihilistic Times
Thinking with Max Weber
Wendy Brown
Harvard University Press, 2023

One of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading—and confounding—political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility.

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.

Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

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No One Eats Alone
Food as a Social Enterprise
Michael S. Carolan
Island Press, 2017
In today’s fast-paced, fast food world, everyone seems to be eating alone, all the time—whether it’s at their desks or in the car. Even those who find time for a family meal are cut off from the people who grew, harvested, distributed, marketed, and sold the foods on their table. Few ever break bread with anyone outside their own socioeconomic group. So why does Michael Carolan say that that no one eats alone? Because all of us are affected by the other people in our vast foodscape. We can no longer afford to ignore these human connections as we struggle with dire problems like hunger, obesity, toxic pesticides, antibiotic resistance, depressed rural economies, and low-wage labor.

Carolan argues that building community is the key to healthy, equitable, and sustainable food. While researching No One Eats Alone, he interviewed more than 250 individuals, from flavorists to Fortune 500 executives, politicians to feedlot managers, low-income families to crop scientists, who play a role in the life of food. Advertising consultants told him of efforts to distance eaters and producers—most food firms don’t want their customers thinking about farm laborers or the people living downstream of processing plants. But he also found stories of people getting together to change their relationship to food and to each other.

There are community farms where suburban moms and immigrant families work side by side, reducing social distance as much as food miles. There are entrepreneurs with little capital or credit who are setting up online exchanges to share kitchen space, upending conventional notions of the economy of scale. There are parents and school board members who are working together to improve cafeteria food rather than relying on soda taxes to combat childhood obesity.

Carolan contends that real change only happens when we start acting like citizens first and consumers second. No One Eats Alone is a book about becoming better food citizens.
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On the Way to Theory
Lawrence Grossberg
Duke University Press, 2024
In On the Way to Theory, Lawrence Grossberg introduces the major ways of thinking that provide the backstory for contemporary Western theory. Asking readers to think about thinking, Grossberg traces cultural and critical theory’s foundations from the contested enlightenments to modern and postmodern conceptualizations of power, experience, language, and existence. He introduces key figures as historical characters and lays out the unique set of tools for thought that their “deep theories” offer. Through finely tuned and accessible descriptions of their concepts and logics, Grossberg highlights thinkers including Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Hall, defining the possibilities of their thought. This book is essential for those interested in how theories shape our understanding of the world, influence our choices, and define our realities. It challenges us to recognize the multiplicity and complexities of ways of thinking in our quest for knowledge and understanding. By setting out a story of theoretical foundations, Grossberg invites readers to think toward the future of theory and expand conversations around theoretical scrutiny and criticism.
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Out of Sync & Out of Work
History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture
Burges, Joel
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Out of Sync & Out of Work explores the representation of obsolescence, particularly of labor, in film and literature during a historical moment in which automation has intensified in capitalist economies. Joel Burges analyzes texts such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wreck-It Ralph, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Iron Council, and examines their “means” of production. Those means include a range of subjects and narrative techniques, including the “residual means” of including classic film stills in a text, the “obstinate means” of depicting machine breaking, the “dated means” of employing the largely defunct technique of stop-motion animation, and the “obsolete” means of celebrating a labor strike. In every case, the novels and films that Burges scrutinizes call on these means to activate the reader’s/viewer’s awareness of historical time. Out of Sync & Out of Work advances its readers’ grasp of the complexities of historical time in contemporary culture, moving the study of temporality forward in film and media studies, literary studies, critical theory, and cultural critique.
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Overshoot
The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
William R. Catton, Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 1980
Our day-to-day experiences over the past decade have taught us that there must be limits to our tremendous appetite for energy, natural resources, and consumer goods. Even utility and oil companies now promote conservation in the face of demands for dwindling energy reserves. And for years some biologists have warned us of the direct correlation between scarcity and population growth. These scientists see an appalling future riding the tidal wave of a worldwide growth of population and technology.

A calm but unflinching realist, Catton suggests that we cannot stop this wave - for we have already overshot the Earth's capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, engineers, and technocrats who continue to write optimistically about energy alternatives. Catton asserts that the technological panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas, harness the winds, and farm the deserts are ignoring the fundamental premise that "the principals of ecology apply to all living things." These principles tell us that, within a finite system, economic expansion is not irreversible and population growth cannot continue indefinitely. If we disregard these facts, our sagging American Dream will soon shatter completely.

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The Pecking Order
Social Hierarchy as a Philosophical Problem
Niko Kolodny
Harvard University Press, 2023

A trenchant case for a novel philosophical position: that our political thinking is driven less by commitments to freedom or fairness than by an aversion to hierarchy.

Niko Kolodny argues that, to a far greater extent than we recognize, our political thinking is driven by a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. In order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse—the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption—we cannot merely appeal to freedom, as libertarians do, or to distributive fairness, as liberals do. We must instead appeal directly to claims against inferiority—to the conviction that no one should stand above or below.

The problem of justifying the state, for example, is often billed as the problem of reconciling the state with the freedom of the individual. Yet, Kolodny argues, once we press hard enough on worries about the state’s encroachment on the individual, we end up in opposition not to unfreedom but to social hierarchy. To make his case, Kolodny takes inspiration from two recent trends in philosophical thought: on the one hand, the revival of the republican and Kantian traditions, with their focus on domination and dependence; on the other, relational egalitarianism, with its focus on the effects of the distribution of income and wealth on our social relations.

The Pecking Order offers a detailed account of relations of inferiority in terms of objectionable asymmetries of power, authority, and regard. Breaking new ground, Kolodny looks ahead to specific kinds of democratic institutions that could safeguard against such relations.

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Peregrinations
Walking in American Literature
Amy T Hamilton
University of Nevada Press, 2018
Peregrinate: To travel or wander around from place to place.

The land of the United States is defined by vast distances encouraging human movement and migration on a grand scale. Consequently, American stories are filled with descriptions of human bodies walking through the land.

In Peregrinations, Amy T. Hamilton examines stories told by and about Indigenous American, Euroamerican, and Mexican walkers. Walking as a central experience that ties these texts together—never simply a metaphor or allegory—offers storytellers and authors an elastic figure through which to engage diverse cultural practices and beliefs including Puritan and Catholic teachings, Diné and Anishinaabe oral traditions, Chicanx histories, and European literary traditions.

Hamilton argues that walking bodies alert readers to the ways the physical world—more-than-human animals, trees, rocks, wind, sunlight, and human bodies—has a hand in creating experience and meaning. Through material ecocriticism, a reading practice attentive to historical and ongoing oppressions, exclusions, and displacements, she reveals complex layerings of narrative and materiality in stories of walking human bodies.

This powerful and pioneering methodology for understanding place and identity, clarifies the wide variety of American stories about human relationships with the land and the ethical implications of the embeddedness of humans in the more-than-human world.
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Philosophical Topics 41.2
Envisioning Plurality: Feminist Perspectives on Pluralism in Ethics, Politics, and Social Theory
Jean Keller
University of Arkansas Press, 2015

Contents:
Why a Feminist Volume on Pluralism? – Bonnie Mann and Jean Keller
PLURALISM ’S FAILURES AND CERTAIN CONDITIONS FOR THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCCESS
Indigenous Agencies and the Pluralism of Empire – Scott L. Pratt
What Would Philosophic Pluralism Look Like?: True Dialogue, Epistemic Credibility, Rational Parity, and Death in the University – Jennifer Lisa Vest
Asking Too Much? Civility vs. Pluralism – Alison Reiheld
Attending to Others: Simone Weil and Epistemic Pluralism – Shari Stone-Mediatore
FEMINIST PLURALISM AND RELIGIOUS WORLDVIEWS
Islamic Feminisms and Freedom – Allison Weir
Is an “Islamic Feminism” Possible?: Gender Politics in the Contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran – Paria Gashtili
Beyond the Modern/Religious Dichotomy: The Veil and Feminist Solidarity in Contemporary Turkey – Fulden Ibrahimhakkioglu
Philosophy, Religion, Race, and Queerness: A Question of Accommodation or Access – Kim Q. Hall
FEMINIST PLURALISM AND FUNDAMENTAL VALUES
Value Pluralism, Intuitions, and Reflective Equilibrium – Lisa Tessman
Radical-cum-Relation: Bridging Feminist Ethics and Native Individual Autonomy – Shay Welch

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Planetary Longings
Mary Louise Pratt
Duke University Press, 2022
In Planetary Longings eminent cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt posits that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first mark a turning point in the human and planetary condition. Examining the forces of modernity, neoliberalism, coloniality, and indigeneity in their pre- and postmillennial forms, Pratt reflects on the crisis of futurity that accompanies the millennial turn in relation to environmental disaster and to the new forms of thinking it has catalyzed. She turns to 1990s Latin American vernacular culture, literary fiction, and social movements, which simultaneously registered neoliberalism’s devastating effects and pursued alternate ways of knowing and living. Tracing the workings of colonialism alongside the history of anticolonial struggles and Indigenous mobilizations in the Americas, Pratt analyzes indigeneity both as a key index of coloniality, neoliberal extraction, and ecological destruction, and as a source for alternative modes of thought and being. Ultimately, Pratt demonstrates that the changes on either side of the millennium have catalyzed new forms of world-making and knowledge-making in the face of an unknowable and catastrophic future.
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Play Reconsidered
Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression
Thomas S. Henricks
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Understanding the significance of adult play in the life of modern societies

Within the social sciences, few matters are as significant as the study of human play--or as neglected. In Play Reconsidered, rather than viewing play simply as a preoccupation of the young and a vehicle for skill development, Thomas S. Henricks argues that it’s a social and cultural phenomenon of adult life, enveloped by wider structures and processes of society. In that context, he argues that a truly sociological approach to play should begin with a consideration of the largely overlooked writings on play and play-related topics by some of the classic sociological thinkers of the twentieth century.

Henricks explores Karl Marx’s analysis of creativity in human labor, examines Emile Durkheim’s observations on the role of ritual and the formation of collective consciousness, extends Max Weber’s ideas about the process of rationalization to the realm of expressive culture and play, surveys Georg Simmel’s distinctive approach to sociology and sociability, and discusses Erving Goffman’s focus on human conduct as process and play as “encounter.” These and other discussions of the contributions of more recent sociologists are framed by an initial consideration of Johan Huizinga’s famous challenge to understand the nature and significance of play. In a closing synthesis, Henricks distinguishes play from other forms of human social expression, particularly ritual, communitas, and work.

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Playing Sociology
Theory and Games for Coping with Mimetic Crisis and Social Conflict
Martino Doni
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Play is a key part of human relationships, and we engage in it during every stage and in every facet of our lives. We develop games to include decision-making, risk, chance, competition, and cooperation, which mirror how we navigate social engagement in our everyday lives. In Playing Sociology: Theory and Games for Coping with Mimetic Crisis and Social Conflict, Martino Doni and Stefano Tomelleri employ gaming as a lens through which they analyze the underlying and sometimes hidden aspects of social relationships and conventions. They also provide five sociological games that can be played by teams in workplaces, classrooms, and other settings to encourage creative thinking and to create abstract ways to explore systemic or ongoing conflicts among group members. This research offers a new way to look at and participate in relational dynamics in both theory and practice.
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The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber
Collected Essays
Wolfgang J. Mommsen
University of Chicago Press, 1989
Concentrating on Weber's engagement with political issues and their influence over his more theoretical concepts, Mommsen offers a critical analysis of Weber's notion of democracy, distinguishing its liberal and elitist features.
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Pragmatism and Social Theory
Hans Joas
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Rising concerns among scholars about the intellectual and cultural foundations of democracy have led to a revival of interest in the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. In this book, Hans Joas shows how pragmatism can link divergent intellectual efforts to understand the social contexts of human knowledge, individual freedom, and democratic culture.

Along with pragmatism's impact on American sociology and social research from 1895 to the 1940s, Joas traces its reception by French and German traditions during this century. He explores the influences of pragmatism—often misunderstood—on Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge, and on German thought, with particularly enlightening references to its appropriation by Nazism and its rejection by neo-Marxism. He also explores new currents of social theory in the work of Habermas, Castoriadis, Giddens, and Alexander, fashioning a bridge between Continental thought, American philosophy, and contemporary sociology; he shows how the misapprehension and neglect of pragmatism has led to systematic deficiencies in contemporary social theory.

From this skillful historical and theoretical analysis, Joas creates a powerful case for the enduring legacy of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead for social theorists today.
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Psychoanalysis and Social Theory
The Limits of Sociology
Ian Craib
University of Massachusetts Press, 1989
Provides an introductory analysis of attempts to combine cycle analytical and social theory. Starting from a discussion of the work of Freud, the book goes on to look at more recent attempts to combine the two in the work of members of the Frankfurt school and others such as Christopher Badcock, Christopher Lasch, Talcott Parsons and Eric Erickson. The analysis also covers modern feminist approaches to Freud, notably through the writings of Nancy Chodorow and Juliet Mitchell. The author argues that there is no simple way of combining psychoanalytical and social theory, and that both approaches are limited in scope.
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Punishment and Modern Society
A Study in Social Theory
David Garland
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In this path-breaking book, David Garland argues that punishment is a complex social institution that affects both social relations and cultural meanings. Drawing on theorists from Durkheim to Foucault, he insightfully critiques the entire spectrum of social thought concerning punishment, and reworks it into a new interpretive synthesis.

"Punishment and Modern Society is an outstanding delineation of the sociology of punishment. At last the process that is surely the heart and soul of criminology, and perhaps of sociology as well—punishment—has been rescued from the fringes of these 'disciplines'. . . . This book is a first-class piece of scholarship."—Graeme Newman, Contemporary Sociology

"Garland's treatment of the theorists he draws upon is erudite, faithful and constructive. . . . Punishment and Modern Society is a magnificent example of working social theory."—John R. Sutton, American Journal of Sociology

"Punishment and Modern Society lifts contemporary penal issues from the mundane and narrow contours within which they are so often discussed and relocates them at the forefront of public policy. . . . This book will become a landmark study."—Andrew Rutherford, Legal Studies

"This is a superbly intelligent study. Its comprehensive coverage makes it a genuine review of the field. Its scholarship and incisiveness of judgment will make it a constant reference work for the initiated, and its concluding theoretical synthesis will make it a challenge and inspiration for those undertaking research and writing on the subject. As a state-of-the-art account it is unlikely to be bettered for many a year."—Rod Morgan, British Journal of Criminology

Winner of both the Outstanding Scholarship Award of the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association's Crime, Law, and Deviance Section
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Reckoning with Restorative Justice
Hawai'i Women's Prison Writing
Leanne Trapedo Sims
Duke University Press, 2023
In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in the state of Hawai‘i. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses particularly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project served as a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex.
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Republicanism in Russia
Community Before and After Communism
Oleg Kharkhordin
Harvard University Press, 2018

If Marxism was the apparent loser in the Cold War, it cannot be said that liberalism was the winner, at least not in Russia. Oleg Kharkhordin is not surprised that institutions of liberal democracy failed to take root following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In Republicanism in Russia, he suggests that Russians can find a path to freedom by looking instead to the classical tradition of republican self-government and civic engagement already familiar from their history.

Republicanism has had a steadfast presence in Russia, in spite of tsarist and communist hostility. Originating in the ancient world, especially with Cicero, it continued by way of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and more recently Arendt. While it has not always been easy for Russians to read or write classical republican philosophy, much less implement it, republican ideas have long flowered in Russian literature and are part of a common understanding of freedom, dignity, and what constitutes a worthy life. Contemporary Russian republicanism can be seen in movements defending architectural and cultural heritage, municipal participatory budgeting experiments, and shared governance in academic institutions. Drawing on recent empirical research, Kharkhordin elaborates a theory of res publica different from the communal life inherited from the communist period, one that opens up the possibility for a genuine public life in Russia.

By embracing the indigenous Russian reception of the classical republican tradition, Kharkhordin argues, today’s Russians can sever their country’s dependence on the residual mechanisms of the communist past and realize a new vision for freedom.

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Rethinking Sex
Social Theory and Sexuality Research
R. Connell
Temple University Press, 1993
Sex and Gender Section Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Study of Sex and Gender, American Sociological Association, 1995 This volume of essays sharply questions current knowledge and ideas about sexuality, social theory, and public policy research on sexuality. The contributors, internationally recognized scholars and activists from Australia, examine the dominant research models from the United States and Western Europe and propose a new perspective, one sensitive to the social construction of sexuality and its research and to variation in sexual practices across cultures. Addressing the debates over sexual conduct from contraception to AIDS prevention, Rethinking Sex provides a systematic examination of the social dimensions of sexuality. Social theory, public policy analysis, and historical and survey research are applied to issues ranging from AIDS and gay identity to perceptions of women's sexuality and relations between the state and private sexual behavior. "Sexuality is a major theme in our culture, from the surf video to the opera stage to the papal encyclical. It is, accordingly, one of the major themes of the human sciences, and figures as weighty as Darwin and Freud have made major contributions to it. Social research has, over the last hundred years, produced crucially important evidence for the understanding of sexuality. But social theory has been slow to grapple with the issue, to give it the sophisticated attention that has been devoted to questions of production or of communication. "We are convinced that an adequate social theory of sexuality is essential for progress on 'applied' issues, such as the design of research on the social transmission of human immunodefiency virus (HIV). This chapter attempts a mapping exercise, sorting out the major intellectual frameworks that have governed Western thinking about sexuality. We discuss first the religious and scientific nativism that dominated the field into the twentieth century, the problems this approach ran into, and the rise of social construction approaches to sexuality. We discuss the impasse that social constructionism has reached. In the final part of the chapter we sketch the outline of an approach which can move past these difficulties." --From Chapter 3, "'The Unclean Motion of the Generative Parts': Frameworks in Western Thought on Sexuality"
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The Return of Inequality
Social Change and the Weight of the Past
Mike Savage
Harvard University Press, 2021

A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions.

The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies.

Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution.

Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.

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Revolution Squared
Tahrir, Political Possibilities, and Counterrevolution in Egypt
Atef Shahat Said
Duke University Press, 2024
In Revolution Squared Atef Shahat Said examines the 2011 Egyptian Revolution to trace the expansive range of liberatory possibilities and containment at the heart of every revolution. Drawing on historical analysis and his own participation in the revolution, Said outlines the importance of Tahrir Square and other physical spaces as well as the role of social media and digital spaces. He develops the notion of lived contingency—the ways revolutionary actors practice and experience the revolution in terms of the actions they do or do not take—to show how Egyptians made sense of what was possible during the revolution. Said charts the lived contingencies of Egyptian revolutionaries from the decade prior to the revolution’s outbreak to its peak and the so-called transition to democracy to the 2013 military coup into the present. Contrary to retrospective accounts and counterrevolutionary thought, Said argues that the Egyptian Revolution was not doomed to defeat. Rather, he demonstrates that Egyptians did not fully grasp their immense clout and that limited reformist demands reduced the revolution’s potential for transformation.
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Revolutionary Constitutions
Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law
Bruce Ackerman
Harvard University Press, 2019

A robust defense of democratic populism by one of America’s most renowned and controversial constitutional scholars—the award-winning author of We the People.

Populism is a threat to the democratic world, fuel for demagogues and reactionary crowds—or so its critics would have us believe. But in his award-winning trilogy We the People, Bruce Ackerman showed that Americans have repeatedly rejected this view. Now he draws on a quarter century of scholarship in this essential and surprising inquiry into the origins, successes, and threats to revolutionary constitutionalism around the world. He takes us to India, South Africa, Italy, France, Poland, Burma, Israel, and Iran and provides a blow-by-blow account of the tribulations that confronted popular movements in their insurgent campaigns for constitutional democracy. Despite their many differences, populist leaders such as Nehru, Mandela, and de Gaulle encountered similar dilemmas at critical turning points, and each managed something overlooked but essential. Rather than deploy their charismatic leadership to retain power, they instead used it to confer legitimacy to the citizens and institutions of constitutional democracy.

Ackerman returns to the United States in his last chapter to provide new insights into the Founders’ acts of constitutional statesmanship as they met very similar challenges to those confronting populist leaders today. In the age of Trump, the democratic system of checks and balances will not survive unless ordinary citizens rally to its defense. Revolutionary Constitutions shows how activists can learn from their predecessors’ successes and profit from their mistakes, and sets up Ackerman’s next volume, which will address how elites and insiders co-opt and destroy the momentum of revolutionary movements.

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Revolutionary Life
The Everyday of the Arab Spring
Asef Bayat
Harvard University Press, 2021

From a leading scholar of the Middle East and North Africa comes a new way of thinking about the Arab Spring and the meaning of revolution.

From the standpoint of revolutionary politics, the Arab Spring can seem like a wasted effort. In Tunisia, where the wave of protest began, as well as in Egypt and the Gulf, regime change never fully took hold. Yet if the Arab Spring failed to disrupt the structures of governments, the movement was transformative in farms, families, and factories, souks and schools.

Seamlessly blending field research, on-the-ground interviews, and social theory, Asef Bayat shows how the practice of everyday life in Egypt and Tunisia was fundamentally altered by revolutionary activity. Women, young adults, the very poor, and members of the underground queer community can credit the Arab Spring with steps toward equality and freedom. There is also potential for further progress, as women’s rights in particular now occupy a firm place in public discourse, preventing retrenchment and ensuring that marginalized voices remain louder than in prerevolutionary days. In addition, the Arab Spring empowered workers: in Egypt alone, more than 700,000 farmers unionized during the years of protest. Labor activism brought about material improvements for a wide range of ordinary people and fostered new cultural and political norms that the forces of reaction cannot simply wish away.

In Bayat’s telling, the Arab Spring emerges as a paradigmatic case of “refolution”—revolution that engenders reform rather than radical change. Both a detailed study and a moving appeal, Revolutionary Life identifies the social gains that were won through resistance.

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The Right to Do Wrong
Morality and the Limits of Law
Mark Osiel
Harvard University Press, 2019

Common morality—in the form of shame, outrage, and stigma—has always been society’s first line of defense against ethical transgressions. Social mores crucially complement the law, Mark Osiel shows, sparing us from oppressive formal regulation.

Much of what we could do, we shouldn’t—and we don’t. We have a free-speech right to be offensive, but we know we will face outrage in response. We may declare bankruptcy, but not without stigma. Moral norms constantly demand more of us than the law requires, sustaining promises we can legally break and preventing disrespectful behavior the law allows.

Mark Osiel takes up this curious interplay between lenient law and restrictive morality, showing that law permits much wrongdoing because we assume that rights are paired with informal but enforceable duties. People will exercise their rights responsibly or else face social shaming. For the most part, this system has worked. Social order persists despite ample opportunity for reprehensible conduct, testifying to the decisive constraints common morality imposes on the way we exercise our legal prerogatives. The Right to Do Wrong collects vivid case studies and social scientific research to explore how resistance to the exercise of rights picks up where law leaves off and shapes the legal system in turn. Building on recent evidence that declining social trust leads to increasing reliance on law, Osiel contends that as social changes produce stronger assertions of individual rights, it becomes more difficult to depend on informal tempering of our unfettered freedoms.

Social norms can be indefensible, Osiel recognizes. But the alternative—more repressive law—is often far worse. This empirically informed study leaves little doubt that robust forms of common morality persist and are essential to the vitality of liberal societies.

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Rise Of Social Theory
Johan Heilbron
University of Minnesota Press, 1995

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The Rise of the Masses
Spontaneous Mobilization and Contentious Politics
Benjamin Abrams
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An insightful examination of how intersecting individual motivations and social structures mobilize spontaneous mass protests.

Between 15 and 26 million Americans participated in protests surrounding the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and others as part of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, which is only one of the most recent examples of an immense mobilization of citizens around a cause. In The Rise of the Masses, sociologist Benjamin Abrams addresses why and how people spontaneously protest, riot, and revolt en masse. While most uprisings of such a scale require tremendous resources and organizing, this book focuses on cases where people with no connection to organized movements take to the streets, largely of their own accord. Looking to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Uprising, as well as the historical case of the French Revolution, Abrams lays out a theory of how and why massive mobilizations arise without the large-scale planning that usually goes into staging protests.

Analyzing a breadth of historical and regional cases that provide insight into mass collective behavior, Abrams draws on first-person interviews and archival sources to argue that people organically mobilize when a movement speaks to their pre-existing dispositions and when structural and social conditions make it easier to get involved—what Abrams terms affinity-convergence theory. Shedding a light on the drivers behind large spontaneous protests, The Rise of the Masses offers a significant theory that could help predict movements to come.
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The Risk Society Revisited
Social Theory and Risk Governance
Eugene Rosa
Temple University Press, 2015

Risk is a part of life. How we handle uncertainty and deal with potential threats influence decision making throughout our lives. In The Risk Society Revisited, Eugene A. Rosa, Ortwin Renn, and Aaron M. McCright offer the first book to present an integrated theory of risk and governance.

The authors examine our sociological understanding of risk and how we reconcile modern human conditions with our handling of risk in our quest for improved quality of life. They build a new framework for understanding risk—one that provides an innovative connection between social theory and the governance of technological and environmental risks and the sociopolitical challenges they pose for a sustainable future.

Showing how our consciousness affects risk in the decisions we make—as individuals and as members of a democratic society—The Risk Society Revisited makes an important contribution to the literature of risk research.

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Sensual Relations
Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory
David Howes
University of Michigan Press, 2003
With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.
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Shadow Bodies
Black Women, Ideology, Representation, and Politics
Jordan-Zachery, Julia S.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
What does it mean for Black women to organize in a political context that has generally ignored them or been unresponsive although Black women have shown themselves an important voting bloc? How for example, does #sayhername translate into a political agenda that manifests itself in specific policies? Shadow Bodies focuses on the positionality of the Black woman’s body, which serves as a springboard for helping us think through political and cultural representations. It does so by asking: How do discursive practices, both speech and silences, support and maintain hegemonic understandings of Black womanhood thereby rendering some Black women as shadow bodies, unseen and unremarked upon?  

Grounded in Black feminist thought, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery looks at the functioning of scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies in the framing of HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and mental illness and how such functioning renders some bodies invisible in Black politics in general and Black women’s politics specifically. 
 
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A Silvan Tomkins Handbook
Foundations for Affect Theory
Adam J. Frank
University of Minnesota Press, 2020

An accessible guide to the work of American psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins

 

The brilliant and complex theories of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) have inspired the turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, these theories are not well understood. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook makes his theories portable across a range of interdisciplinary contexts and accessible to a wide variety of contemporary scholars and students of affect. 

A Silvan Tomkins Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins’s affect theory as he developed it in his four-volume masterwork Affect Imagery Consciousness. It shows how his key terms and conceptual innovations can be used to build robust frameworks for theorizing affect and emotion. In addition to clarifying his affect theory, the Handbook emphasizes Tomkins’s other significant contributions, from his broad theories of imagery and consciousness to more focused concepts of scenes and scripts. With their extensive experience engaging and teaching Tomkins’s work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson provide a user-friendly guide for readers who want to know more about the foundations of affect studies.

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Social Justice
Theories, Issues, and Movements (Revised and Expanded Edition)
Loretta Capeheart
Rutgers University Press, 2020
An eye for an eye, the balance of the scales – for centuries, these and other traditional concepts exemplified the public’s perception of justice. Today, popular culture, including television shows like Law and Order, informs the public’s vision. But do age-old symbols, portrayals in the media, and existing systems truly represent justice in all of its nuanced forms, or do we need to think beyond these notions? The second edition of Social Justice: Theories, Issues, and Movements responds to the need for a comprehensive introduction to these issues.
 
Theories of social justice are presented in an accessible fashion to encourage engagement of students, activists, and scholars with these important lines of inquiry. Issues are analyzed utilizing various theories for furthering engagement in possibilities. Struggles for justice -- from legal cases to on the ground movements -- are presented for historical context and to inform the way forward.
 
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Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon
Work, Power and Political Strategy
Aaron Jaffe
Pluto Press, 2020
How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of social reproduction theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism? Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this book, Aaron Jaffe extracts SRT's radical potential, relying on recent struggles, including the International Women's Strike and the teachers' strikes, showing how we can use SRT to motivate socialist politics and strategy. Using social reproduction theory to appreciate distinct forms of social domination, this unique and necessary book will have vital strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists.
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Social Theory After the Internet
Media, Technology, and Globalization
Ralph Schroeder
University College London, 2018
The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past twenty-five years, yet existing theories of communication have not kept pace with the digital world. This book focuses on everyday effects of the internet—including information-seeking, big data, and the growing importance of smartphone use—to explain how the internet surpasses traditional media. Synthesizing global perspectives, Ralph Schroeder posits a theory on the internet’s role, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance.
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Social Theory and the Study of Israelite Religion
Essays in Retrospect and Prospect
Saul M. Olyan
SBL Press, 2012
This volume assesses past, theoretically engaged work on Israelite religion and presents new approaches to particular problems and larger interpretive and methodological questions. It gathers previously unpublished research by senior and mid-career scholars well known for their contributions in the area of social theory and the study of Israelite religion and by junior scholars whose writing is just beginning to have a serious impact on the field. The volume begins with a critical introduction by the editor. Topics of interest to the contributors include gender, violence, social change, the festivals, the dynamics of shame and honor, and the relationship of text to ritual. The contributors engage theory from social and cultural anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and ritual studies. Theoretical models are evaluated in light of the primary data, and some authors modify or adapt theory to increase its utility for biblical studies. The contributors are Susan Ackerman, Stephen L. Cook, Ronald Hendel, T. M. Lemos, Nathaniel B. Levtow, Carol Meyers, Saul M. Olyan, Rüdiger Schmitt, Robert R. Wilson, and David P. Wright.
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Social Theory In Archaeology
Michael Brian Schiffer
University of Utah Press, 2000

Since the debut of the New Archaeology in the 1960s, approaches to the science of interpreting the material past have proliferated.

Seeking to find common ground in an increasingly fractious and polarized discipline, a group of archaeological theorists representing various schools of thought gathered in a roundtable, during the fall of 1997. As organizer, Michael Schiffer sought to build bridges that might begin to span the conceptual chasms that have formed in archaeology during the past few decades. Many participants in the roundtable accepted the challenge of building bridges, but some rejected the premise that bridge building is desirable or feasible. Even so, every chapter in the resulting volume contributes something provocative or significant to the enterprise of constructing social theory in archaeology and setting the agenda for future social-theoretic research.

With contributions from every major school of thought, whether informed by evolutionary theory, feminism, chaos theory, behavioralism, or post-processualism, this volume serves as both handbook to an array of theoretical approaches and as a useful look at each school’s response to criticism.

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A Social Theory of Corruption
Notes from the Indian Subcontinent
Sudhir Chella Rajan
Harvard University Press, 2020

A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century.

In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption.

Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled.

Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.

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The Social Theory of Practices
Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions
Stephen Turner
University of Chicago Press, 1994
The concept of "practices"—whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture—is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities.

Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by which a "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea.

Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory.
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The Socially Responsive Self
Social Theory and Professional Ethics
Larry May
University of Chicago Press, 1996
Larry May argues that socially responsive individuals need not be self-sacrificing or overly conscientious. According to May, a person's integrity and moral responsibility are shaped and limited not just by conscience but also by socialization and moral support from the communities to which he or she belongs.

Applying his theory of responsibility to professional ethics, May contends that current methods of professional socialization should be changed so that professionals are not expected to ignore considerations of personal well-being, family, or community. For instance, lawyers should not place client loyalty above concerns for the common good; doctors should not place the physical well-being of patients above their mental and spiritual well-being; scientists and engineers should not feel obliged to blow the whistle on fraud and corruption unless their professional groups protect them from retaliation.

This book should prove provocative reading for philosophers, political scientists, social theorists, professionals of many stripes, and ethicists.
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Society and Economy
Framework and Principles
Mark Granovetter
Harvard University Press, 2017

Society and Economy—a work of exceptional ambition by the founder of modern economic sociology—is the first full account of Mark Granovetter’s ideas about the diverse ways in which society and economy are intertwined.

The economy is not a sphere separate from other human activities, Granovetter writes. It is deeply embedded in social relations and subject to the same emotions, ideas, and constraints as religion, science, politics, or law. While some actions can be understood in traditional economic terms as people working rationally toward well-defined ends, much human behavior is harder to fit into that simple framework. Actors sometimes follow social norms with a passionate faith in their appropriateness, and at other times they conform without conscious thought. They also trust others when there is no obvious reason to do so. The power individuals wield over one another can have a major impact on economic outcomes, even when that power arises from noneconomic sources.

Although people depend on social norms, culture, trust, and power to solve problems, the guidance these offer is often murky and complicated. Granovetter explores how problem solvers improvise to assemble pragmatic solutions from this multitude of principles. He draws throughout on arguments from psychology, social network studies, and long-term historical and political analysis and suggests ways to maneuver back and forth among these approaches. Underlying Granovetter’s arguments is an attempt to move beyond such simple dualisms as agency/structure to a more complex and subtle appreciation of the nuances and dynamics that drive social and economic life.

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Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body
Materialisms, Technologies, Ecologies
Joshua I. Newman
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

The moving body—pervasively occupied by fitness activities, intense training and dieting regimes, recreational practices, and high-profile sporting mega-events—holds a vital function in contemporary society. As the body moves—as it performs, sweats, runs, and jumps—it sets in motion an intricate web of scientific rationalities, spatial arrangements, corporate imperatives, and identity politics (i.e. politics of gender, race, social class, etc.). It represents vitality in its productive and physiological capacities, it drives a complex economy of experiences and products, and it is a meaningful site of cultural identities and politics.
 
Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body work from a simple premise: as it moves, the material body matters. Adding to the burgeoning fields of sport studies and body studies, the works featured here draw upon the traditions of feminist theory, posthumanism, actor network theory, and new materialism to reposition the physical, moving body as crucial to the cultural, political, environmental, and economic systems that it constitutes and within which is constituted. Once assembled, the book presents a study of bodies in motion—made to move in contexts where technique, performance, speed, strength, and vitality not only define the conduct therein, but provide the very reason for the body’s being within those economies and environments. In so doing, the contributors look to how the body moving for and about rational systems of science, medicine, markets, and geopolity shapes the social and material world in important and unexpected ways.
 
In Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body, contributors explore the extent to which the body, when moving about both ostensibly active body spaces (i.e., the gymnasium, the ball field, exercise laboratory, the track or running trail, the beach, or the sport stadium) and those places less often connected to physical activity (i.e. the home, the street, the classroom, the automobile), is bounded to technologies of life and living; and to the political arrangements that seek to capitalize upon such frames of biological vitality. To do so, the authors problematize the rise of active body science (i.e. kinesiology, sport and exercise sciences, performance biotechnology) and the effects these scientific interventions have on embodied, lived experience.
 
Contributors to Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body will be engaging a range of new and emerging theoretical perspectives, including new materialist, political ecology, developmental systems theory, and new material feminist approaches, to examine the actors and assemblages of movement-based material, political, and economic production. In so doing, contributors will vividly and powerfully illustrate the extent to which a focus on the fleshed body and its material conditions can bring forth new insights or ontological and epistemological innovation to the sociology of sport and physical activity. They will also explore the agency of the body as and amongst things. Such a performative materialist approach explicates how complex assemblages of sport and physical activity—bringing into association everything from muscle fibers and dietary proteins to stadium concrete or regional aquifers—are not only meaningful, but ecological.
 
By focusing on the confluence of agentive materialities, disciplinary technologies, vibrant assemblages, speculative realities, and vital performativities, Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body promises to offer a groundbreaking departure from representationalist tendencies and orthodoxies brought about by the cultural turn in sport and physical cultural studies. It brings the moving body and its physics back into focus: recentering moving flesh and bones as locus of social order, environmental change, and the global political economy.
 
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Status
Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter?
Cecilia L. Ridgeway
Russell Sage Foundation, 2019
Status is ubiquitous in modern life, yet our understanding of its role as a driver of inequality is limited.  In Status, sociologist and social psychologist Cecilia Ridgeway examines how this ancient and universal form of inequality influences today’s ostensibly meritocratic institutions and why it matters. Ridgeway illuminates the complex ways in which status affects human interactions as we work together towards common goals, such as in classroom discussions, family decisions, or workplace deliberations.

Ridgeway’s research on status has important implications for our understanding of social inequality. Distinct from power or wealth, status is prized because it provides affirmation from others and affords access to valuable resources. Ridgeway demonstrates how the conferral of status inevitably contributes to differing life outcomes for individuals, with impacts on pay, wealth creation, and health and wellbeing. Status beliefs are widely held views about who is better in society than others in terms of esteem, wealth, or competence. These beliefs confer advantages which can exacerbate social inequality. Ridgeway notes that status advantages based on race, gender, and class—such as the belief that white men are more competent than others—are the most likely to increase inequality by facilitating greater social and economic opportunities.

Ridgeway argues that status beliefs greatly enhance higher status groups’ ability to maintain their advantages in resources and access to positions of power and make lower status groups less likely to challenge the status quo. Many lower status people will accept their lower status when given a baseline level of dignity and respect—being seen, for example, as poor but hardworking. She also shows that people remain willfully blind to status beliefs and their effects because recognizing them can lead to emotional discomfort. Acknowledging the insidious role of status in our lives would require many higher-status individuals to accept that they may not have succeeded based on their own merit; many lower-status individuals would have to acknowledge that they may have been discriminated against.

Ridgeway suggests that inequality need not be an inevitable consequence of our status beliefs. She shows how status beliefs can be subverted—as when we reject the idea that all racial and gender traits are fixed at birth, thus refuting the idea that women and people of color are less competent than their male and white counterparts. This important new book demonstrates the pervasive influence of  status on social inequality and suggests ways to ensure that it has a less detrimental impact on our lives.
 
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Ten Thousand Years of Inequality
The Archaeology of Wealth Differences
Edited by Timothy A. Kohler and Michael E. Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Is wealth inequality a universal feature of human societies, or did early peoples live an egalitarian existence? How did inequality develop before the modern era? Did inequalities in wealth increase as people settled into a way of life dominated by farming and herding? Why in general do such disparities increase, and how recent are the high levels of wealth inequality now experienced in many developed nations? How can archaeologists tell?

Ten Thousand Years of Inequality addresses these and other questions by presenting the first set of consistent quantitative measurements of ancient wealth inequality. The authors are archaeologists who have adapted the Gini index, a statistical measure of wealth distribution often used by economists to measure contemporary inequality, and applied it to house-size distributions over time and around the world. Clear descriptions of methods and assumptions serve as a model for other archaeologists and historians who want to document past patterns of wealth disparity.

The chapters cover a variety of ancient cases, including early hunter-­gatherers, farmer villages, and agrarian states and empires. The final chapter synthesizes and compares the results. Among the new and notable outcomes, the authors report a systematic difference between higher levels of inequality in ancient Old World societies and lower levels in their New World counterparts.

For the first time, archaeology allows humanity’s deep past to provide an account of the early manifestations of wealth inequality around the world.

Contributors

Nicholas Ames
Alleen Betzenhauser
Amy Bogaard
Samuel Bowles
Meredith S. Chesson
Abhijit Dandekar
Timothy J. Dennehy
Robert D. Drennan
Laura J. Ellyson
Deniz Enverova
Ronald K. Faulseit
Gary M. Feinman
Mattia Fochesato
Thomas A. Foor
Vishwas D. Gogte
Timothy A. Kohler
Ian Kuijt
Chapurukha M. Kusimba
Mary-Margaret Murphy
Linda M. Nicholas
Rahul C. Oka
Matthew Pailes
Christian E. Peterson
Anna Marie Prentiss
Michael E. Smith
Elizabeth C. Stone
Amy Styring
Jade Whitlam
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Terms of Exchange
Brazilian Intellectuals and the French Social Sciences
Ian Merkel
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A collective intellectual biography that sheds new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy.

Would the most recognizable ideas in the French social sciences have developed without the influence of Brazilian intellectuals? While any study of Brazilian social sciences acknowledges the influence of French scholars, Ian Merkel argues the reverse is also true: the “French” social sciences were profoundly marked by Brazilian intellectual thought, particularly through the University of São Paulo. Through the idea of the “cluster,” Merkel traces the intertwined networks of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Roger Bastide, and Pierre Monbeig as they overlapped at USP and engaged with Brazilian scholars such as Mário de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado Jr..
 
Through this collective intellectual biography of Brazilian and French social sciences, Terms of Exchange reveals connections that shed new light on the Annales school, structuralism, and racial democracy, even as it prompts us to revisit established thinking on the process of knowledge formation through fieldwork and intellectual exchange. At a time when canons are being rewritten, this book reframes the history of modern social scientific thought.
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The Thinking Woman
Julienne van Loon
Rutgers University Press, 2021

While women have struggled to gain recognition in the discipline of philosophy, there is no shortage of brilliant female thinkers. What can these women teach us about ethics, politics, and the nature of existence, and how might we relate these big ideas back to the smaller everyday concerns of domestic life, work, play, love, and relationships?
Australian novelist Julienne van Loon goes on a worldwide quest to answer these questions, by engaging with eight world-renowned thinkers who have deep insights on humanity and society: media scholar Laura Kipnis, novelist Siri Hustvedt, political philosopher Nancy Holmstrom, psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva, domestic violence reformer Rosie Batty, peace activist Helen Caldicott, historian Marina Warner, and feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti. As she speaks to these women, she reflects on her own experiences. Combining the intimacy of a memoir with the intellectual stimulation of a theoretical text, The Thinking Woman draws novel connections between the philosophical, personal, and political. Giving readers a new appreciation for both the ethical complexities and wonder of everyday life, this book is inspiration to all thinking people.

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The Three Axial Ages
Moral, Material, Mental
Torpey, John
Rutgers University Press, 2017
How should we think about the “shape” of human history since the birth of cities, and where are we headed? Sociologist and historian John Torpey proposes that the “Axial Age” of the first millennium BCE, when some of the world’s major religious and intellectual developments first emerged, was only one of three such decisive periods that can be used to directly affect present social problems, from economic inequality to ecological destruction.
 
Torpey’s argument advances the idea that there are in fact three “Axial Ages,” instead of one original Axial Age and several subsequent, smaller developments. Each of the three ages contributed decisively to how humanity lives, and the difficulties it faces. The earliest, or original, Axial Age was a moral one; the second was material, and revolved around the creation and use of physical objects; and the third is chiefly mental, and focused on the technological. While there are profound risks and challenges, Torpey shows how a worldview that combines the strengths of all three ages has the potential to usher in a period of exceptional human freedom and possibility.
 
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Time for Things
Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption
Stephen D. Rosenberg
Harvard University Press, 2020

Modern life is full of stuff yet bereft of time. An economic sociologist offers an ingenious explanation for why, over the past seventy-five years, Americans have come to prefer consumption to leisure.

Productivity has increased steadily since the mid-twentieth century, yet Americans today work roughly as much as they did then: forty hours per week. We have witnessed, during this same period, relentless growth in consumption. This pattern represents a striking departure from the preceding century, when working hours fell precipitously. It also contradicts standard economic theory, which tells us that increasing consumption yields diminishing marginal utility, and empirical research, which shows that work is a significant source of discontent. So why do we continue to trade our time for more stuff?

Time for Things offers a novel explanation for this puzzle. Stephen Rosenberg argues that, during the twentieth century, workers began to construe consumer goods as stores of potential free time to rationalize the exchange of their labor for a wage. For example, when a worker exchanges their labor for an automobile, they acquire a duration of free activity that can be held in reserve, counterbalancing the unfree activity represented by work. This understanding of commodities as repositories of hypothetical utility was made possible, Rosenberg suggests, by the standardization of durable consumer goods, as well as warranties, brands, and product-testing, which assured wage earners that the goods they purchased would be of consistent, measurable quality.

This theory clarifies perplexing aspects of behavior under industrial capitalism—the urgency to spend earnings on things, the preference to own rather than rent consumer goods—as well as a variety of historical developments, including the coincident rise of mass consumption and the legitimation of wage labor.

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An Ugly Word
Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States
Ann Morning
Russell Sage Foundation, 2022
Scholars and politicians often assume a significant gap between the ways that Americans and Europeans think about race. According to this template, in the U.S. race is associated with physical characteristics, while in Western Europe race has disappeared, and discrimination is based on insurmountable cultural differences. However, little research has addressed how average Americans and Europeans actually think and talk about race. In An Ugly Word, sociologists Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri examine American and Italian understandings of group difference in order to determine if and how they may differ.
 
Morning and Maneri interviewed over 150 people across the two countries about differences among what they refer to as “descent-based groups.” Using this concept allowed them to sidestep the language of “race” and “ethnicity,” which can be unnecessarily narrow, poorly defined, or even offensive to some. Drawing on these interviews, the authors find that while ways of speaking about group difference vary considerably across the Atlantic, underlying beliefs about it do not. The similarity in American and Italian understandings of difference was particularly evident when discussing sports. Both groups relied heavily on traditional stereotypes of Black physicality to explain Black athletes’ overrepresentation in sports like U.S. football and their underrepresentation in sports like swimming – contradicting the claims that a biological notion of race is a distinctly American phenomenon.
 
While American and Italian concepts of difference may overlap extensively, they are not identical. Interviews in Italy were more likely to reveal beliefs about groups’ innate, unchangeable temperaments, such as friendly Senegalese and dishonest Roma. And where physical difference was seen by Italians as superficial and unimportant, cultural difference was perceived as deeply meaningful and consequential. In contrast, U.S. interviewees saw cultural difference as supremely malleable—and often ascribed the same fluidity to racial identity, which they believed stemmed from culture as well as biology. In light of their findings, Morning and Maneri propose a new approach to understanding cross-cultural beliefs about descent-based difference that includes identifying the traits people believe differentiate groups, how they believe those traits are acquired, and whether they believe these traits can change.
 
An Ugly Word is an illuminating, cross-national examination of the ways in which people around the world make sense of race and difference.
 
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Uncanny Histories in Film and Media
Patrice Petro
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Uncanny Histories in Film and Media brings together a stellar lineup of established and emergent scholars who explore the uncanny twists and turns that are often occluded in larger accounts of film and media. Prompted by fresh archival research and new conceptual approaches, the works included here probe the uncanny as a mode of historical analysis that reveals surprising connections and unsettling continuities.  The uncanny stands for what often eludes us, for what remains unfamiliar or mysterious or strange.  Whether writing about film movements, individual works, or the legacies of major or forgotten critics and theorists, the contributors remind us that at the heart of the uncanny, and indeed the writing of history, is a troubling of definitions, a challenge to our inherited narratives, and a disturbance of what was once familiar in the uncanny histories of our field.
 
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Unruly Practices
Power, Discorse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory
Fraser, Nancy
University of Minnesota Press, 1989
“A wonderfully rich and insightful collection of well-integrated essays on important current thinkers and social movements.” -Martin Jay
University of California, Berkeley

Unruly Practices brings together a series of widely discussed essays in feminism and social theory.  Read together, they constitute a sustained critical encounter with leading European and American approaches to social theory.  In addition, Nancy Fraser develops a new and original socialist-feminist critical theory that overcomes many of the limitations of current alternatives.  First, in a series of critical essays, she deploys philosophical and literary techniques to sort the wheat from the chaff in the work of Michel Foucault, the French deconstructionists, Richard Rorty, and Jurgen Habermas.  Then, in a group of constructive essays, she incorporates their respective strengths in a new critical theory of late-capitalist political culture.

Fraser breaks new ground methodologically by integrating the previously divergent insights of poststructuralism, critical social theory, feminist theory, and pragmatism.  Thematically, she deals with varied forms of dominance and subordination in modern, industrial, late-capitalist societies - especially gender dominance and subordination; state-bureaucratic forms of organization; the institutional politics of knowledge and expertise; and the structure and function of social-welfare programs.  In the last section of the book, these themes are integrated in an original theory of “the politics of need interpretation.”  This concept becomes the linchpin of he socialist-feminist critical theory proposed in the last chapter.
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Unselfishness
The Role of the Vicarious Affects in Moral Philosophy and Social Theory
Nicholas Rescher
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975
In Unselfishness, Nicholas Rescher criticizes the stance of many contemporary moral philosophers and social theorists-that rationality conflicts with morality, and instead defends the position of historical thinkers who believed that the worth of altruism is irreducible and that its rationalization does not require recourse to prudential self-interest. To support his position, Rescher provides detailed examples, and a theoretical critique of utilitarian morality.
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Violent Affections
Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia
Alexander Sasha Kondakov
University College London, 2022
An inciteful analysis of the affective rhetoric surrounding Russian anti-LGBTQ violence.

Passed in 2013, Russia’s “gay propaganda” law cemented the nation’s anti-LGBTQ sentiment into legal rhetoric that has since emboldened countless instances of violence against queer people. Based on an analysis of over three hundred criminal cases of anti-queer violence in Russia before and after the introduction of the law, Violent Affections shows how violent acts are framed in emotional language by perpetrators during their criminal trials, thus uncovering the techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against queer people. Utilizing an original methodology of studying legal memes, this book argues that individual affective states are directly connected to the political and legislative violence aimed at policing queer lives. Alexander Sasha Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature–queer theory and affect theory–in order to conceptualize what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. The book traces how affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus, eventually enabling the turn from a memetic response to violent action.
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The Web of Violence
From Interpersonal to Global
Edited by Jennifer Turpin and Lester Kurtz
University of Illinois Press, 1996

Violence is a topic of concern everywhere--in the media, in churches, in the halls of governments. In every land and in every culture violence is considered by most to be taboo, a last resort. Yet under certain conditions, from the level of the family to the level of nations, violence is used as a mechanism of social control. Various rationalizations thus emerge to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate violence.

The Web of Violence explores the interrelationship among personal, collective, national, and global levels of violence. This unique collection brings together a number of internationally known contributors to address the genesis and manifestations of violence in the search for a remedy for this confounding social problem.

As the global community becomes more intimate, we must better understand the nature of violence. The Web of Violence supports this aim by examining the dangerous human phenomenon from many perspectives, at different levels, and using multiple methodologies.

Contributors: Robert Jay Lifton, Christopher G. Ellison, John P. Bartkowski, Yuan-Horng Chu, Philip Smith, Robert Elias, Birgit Brock-Utne, Riane Eisler, Johan Galtung

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“Weltbeziehung”
The Study of our Relationship to the World
Edited by Bettina Hollstein, Hartmut Rosa, and Jörg Rüpke
Campus Verlag, 2023
An interdisciplinary explication of the theory of “Weltbeziehung” or “relationship to the world.”

Human beings are always and essentially placed and situated in a world to which they relate, and it is this relationship that defines them. This book describes the historical and cultural variety of self-world-relations of this kind and revolves around aspects and dimensions of what Hartmut Rosa has gathered under the term “Weltbeziehung” (relationship to the world), expanding on his theory on resonance.

This book starts from this innovative approach to discuss socially relevant questions and conceptions of the present, like property, progress, or markets and then contrasts them with non-Western or non-modern forms of “Weltbeziehungen” like specific conceptions of virtue or fatalistic practices. In an effort to overcome Eurocentric biases, the book also includes studies about the decolonization of research in India and the role of markets in China. In addition, comparisons across time help to further refine our understanding of “Weltbeziehungen.” Finally, the volume’s contributions discuss a number of challenges and practical problems of the contemporary world such as the migration crises, sharing practices, or knowledge production in light of this conception.
 
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Whistleblowing
Toward a New Theory
Kate Kenny
Harvard University Press, 2019

Society needs whistleblowers, yet to speak up and expose wrongdoing often results in professional and personal ruin. Kate Kenny draws on the stories of whistleblowers to explain why this is, and what must be done to protect those who have the courage to expose the truth.

Despite their substantial contribution to society, whistleblowers are considered martyrs more than heroes. When people expose serious wrongdoing in their organizations, they are often punished or ignored. Many end up isolated by colleagues, their professional careers destroyed. The financial industry, rife with scandals, is the focus of Kate Kenny’s penetrating global study. Introducing whistleblowers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Ireland working at companies like Wachovia, Halifax Bank of Scotland, and Countrywide–Bank of America, Whistleblowing suggests practices that would make it less perilous to hold the powerful to account and would leave us all better off.

Kenny interviewed the men and women who reported unethical and illegal conduct at major corporations in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis. Many were compliance officers working in influential organizations that claimed to follow the rules. Using the concept of affective recognition to explain how the norms at work powerfully influence our understandings of right and wrong, she reframes whistleblowing as a collective phenomenon, not just a personal choice but a vital public service.

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