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168 books match the query 'Social Theory' and 14 start with p

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Peer to Peer

Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Pazaitis

University of Westminster Press, 2019

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a more profound transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As capitalism faces a series of structural crises, a new social, political and economic dynamic is emerging: peer to peer.

What is peer to peer? Why is it essential for building a commons-centric future? How could this happen? These are the questions this book tries to answer. Peer to peer is a type of social relations in human networks, as well as a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible. Thus, peer to peer enables a new mode of production and creates the potential for a transition to a commons-oriented economy.

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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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Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being

Ghassan Hage

Duke University Press, 2025

In Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being, Ghassan Hage explores the great French social theorist’s work and revitalizes conventional and undertheorized aspects of his thinking. Hage focuses on Bourdieu’s concern with social being and what constitutes a worthwhile and fulfilling life. Such a life is not something that one either has or does not have; rather, society distributes and assigns values to ways of living. These values are structured by relations of power and domination and are subject to the outcome of political conflicts. Hage elucidates this political economy of being by reworking Bourdieu’s key concepts of habitus, illusio, symbolic capital, and field. In this political economy, people enjoy a worthwhile life to the degree that they are able to orient and deploy themselves practically in the world that surrounds them, have a sense of purpose, and achieve a level of social recognition. For Hage, the project of theorizing and understanding how people struggle to define, legitimize, and live a viable life in the face of symbolic domination permeates all of Bourdieu’s work.

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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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Political Visions of Ukraine

Models of a Common Future

Bogdan Kolesnyk

Central European University Press, 2026

For generations raised on the promise of freedom of 1991, the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv in the winter 2013-2014 were a sudden, electrifying chance to make that promise real. But what happens when hope collides with the complicated realities of politics, society, economy, and the competing against notions of history?
Drawing on intellectual discourses from 2013 onwards, this book maps those collisions, reconstructing Ukraine’s “noumenal parliament” — the constellation of voices that have vied to define the nation’s future. Bogdan Kolesnyk explains why Ukraine’s is not a single story but a composite of many, why neither liberal consolidation nor national stories alone provide a sufficient answer, and suggests how justice, reason and republican institutions might be the anchors for plural polity to endure.
In attempting to understand Ukrainian socio-political reality on its own terms from beyond its borders, this book urgently enquires what kind of future is worth fighting for?

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Politics of Legitimacy

State-Society Relations and Patterns of Chinese Politics

Dingxin Zhao

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A sweeping work on China that interrogates how states gain, maintain, and lose legitimacy.

The Chinese communist state has survived massive social changes, including the introduction of capitalist markets, an ongoing explosion of technological innovation, and an unprecedented jump in wealth and education, accompanied by a major cultural transformation. How has China managed to maintain its power even as the ground has so profoundly shifted? In Politics of Legitimacy, Dingxin Zhao argues that state power can be legitimized in three ideal-typical ways: a set of values upheld by the state (ideological legitimacy), recognized political processes such as regular competitive elections (procedural legitimacy), and the state’s capacity to provide public goods (performance legitimacy).

Building on this theoretical framework, Zhao analyzes different aspects of Chinese politics, including the tragic ending of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, the weak development of mass-based nationalism in post-Mao China, the reasons behind China’s economic success, the anti-establishment tendency of the Chinese mass media and social media, and the sources of political tension in China, despite a superb economy. Moreover, Zhao’s innovative framework is widely applicable beyond China, shifting our attention from regime-type categories to the tools and relationships that determine their survival or collapse, and illuminating the current global emergence of conservatism and religious nationalism.

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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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Promises Beyond Memory

Archives, Art, and the Afterlives of Violence in Latin America

Vikki Bell

Duke University Press, 2026

In Promises Beyond Memory, Vikki Bell shows how archives of contemporary political violence in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia challenge the idea that simply sheltering the documentation of violence is sufficient to fulfill the obligations of attending to the past. Beyond mere preservation, these archives, museums, and sites of memory invite exploratory modes of enlivening the past through aesthetic practices like photography, installation, film, and performance. These practices foster the “survivance” of memory where populations still grapple with legacies of violence and often state-sponsored mass disappearance and torture. Rather than produce a definitive account of the past, such survivance facilitates polyvocal articulations that open deeply political and ethical questions around contested histories. They may even create moments for what Bell terms “tender forgetting”—the ability to remember without reawakening trauma. Integrating theory, extensive archival work, and interviews with artists, archivists, museum workers, and survivors of state violence, Bell analyses the creative ways that archives pass on stories of violence as they seek to defend against attempts to rewrite the past.

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Proposals for a Caring Economy

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Offering models of care beyond capitalist constraints

For too long, questions of care provision and inclusion have been shaped by economic justifications. This has led to the deprivation of care to individuals and communities based on capitalist assumptions about what and who can be cared for. Proposals for a Caring Economy takes these assumptions to task. Moving between examples focused on immigration and agriculture, patients and art audiences, green energy transitions and unhoused people, prison abolitionists and clients of domestic violence services, the contributors here argue that we need new ways to conceptualize care and its applications.

Proposals for a Caring Economy articulates an economy that situates care at the forefront; sees the preservation of individual, community, and environmental wellbeing as the primary good; and focuses attention on building a sustainable economy of caring that will radically transform social connections and possibilities.

Contributors: Chelsey R. Carter, Yale U; David McDermott Hughes, Rutgers U; Stephanie Delise Jones, U of California, Riverside; Sameena Mulla, Emory U; Katy Overstreet, Saxo Institute, U of Copenhagen; Michelle Parsons, Northern Arizona U; Adair Rounthwaite, U of Washington; Damien M. Sojoyner, U of California, Irvine; Emily Yates-Doerr, Oregon State U.

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