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Book review: Critique on the Couch: Why Critical Theory Needs Psychoanalysis Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Peter J Verovšek
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Practical aesthesis Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Rob Shields, Nicholas Hardy
Aesthesis, the classical term for sensing and perceiving, is at the heart of innumerable problems that plague global society. The purpose of this article is to open a conversation on aesthesis. We survey the roots and relevance of aesthesis as a direct albeit contested relation and engagement with the world and with Others. From its pre-Socratic origins, aesthesis has been both a pragmatic, somatic
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Book review: The Poverty of Philosophy: Readings in Non and Other Philosophies or Arts of Immanence Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Jonathan Fardy
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‘I have to like it’: Working-class awareness among workers at a Bata shoe factory Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-04-16 Kateřina Nedbálková
The working class has been interpreted within various disciplines and conceptual frameworks, some pointing to the gap between the depiction of the working class as a potentially active social force...
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The Easybeats: From power pop to Oz rock Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Jon Stratton
The Easybeats’ 1960s career is viewed as being in two halves. In the first, they played pop songs composed by Stevie Wright and George Young. The group was incredibly successful in Australia spawni...
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Rethinking the ordinary and the extraordinary: Reading Rancière’s dissensual politics through Kuhn Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-04-02 Raffaela Puggioni
Jacques Rancière’s theorisation of the political has been particularly influential in investigating political struggles and social movements. By distinguishing between the police order – tasked wit...
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The Other Social Science: Three centuries of common heterodoxy Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-03-23 Peter Lenco
This paper starts with the observation that at least for the last century there has been an orthodoxy in the social sciences characterized by sui generis structures of various kinds but also (parad...
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Towards a post-pandemic social contract Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-03-02 Domonkos Sik
Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic f...
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The limits of satire, or the reification of cultural politics Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Nicholas Holm
In the first decades of the 21st century, humour has been increasingly embraced as a legitimate means by which to cover, analyse and intervene in political issues. Most frequently, this political a...
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Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy? Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Peter Wagner
Johann Arnason’s work combines the most erudite historical-comparative sociology, discussing highly knowledgeably enormous stretches of world-history, with the most subtle social and political phil...
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Sociology as political philosophy: Alain Caillé’s anti-utilitarian sociology Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-01-24 Frédéric Vandenberghe
The article presents an overview of the intellectual trajectory of Alain Caillé, the founder and animator of the anti-utilitarian movement in the social sciences (MAUSS) in France. Going back to ea...
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On the genocide concept Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Jon Piccini
A. Dirk Moses’ The Problems of Genocide builds on his decades of work in the field of genocide research. This review article looks at the impact the book has had to date before considering its two ...
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Western tourism at Cu Chi and the memory of war in Vietnam: Dialogical effects of the carnivalesque Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Todd Madigan, Brad West
In this article we analyze the social memories of the Vietnam War afforded by tourism at the Cu Chi battlefield. Specifically, we explore the experiences of tourists at the site in order to address...
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Towards a post-pandemic social contract Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Domonkos Sik
Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic f...
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Ambivalence in Gramsci’s historiography of the Risorgimento Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Michael Wayne
Although Gramsci developed his conceptual methodology out of concrete historical analysis, there is a significant tension between his account of the Risorgimento, which plays into a narrative of It...
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Epistemic bandwagons, speculation, and turnkeys: Some lessons from the tale of the urban ‘underclass’ Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Loïc Wacquant
Drawing on the Begriffsgeschichte of Reinhart Koselleck and the reflexive sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, my book The Invention of the ‘Underclass’ draws a microhistory of the birth, diffusion, and d...
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War as the catalyst of nationalism, or, the demise of the Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman empires Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Emre Amasyalı, John A. Hall
Nationalism is often singled out as the powerful force that brought about the collapse of the last great land empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We offer a different picture: nationalism...
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The populist body in the age of social media: A comparative study of populist and non-populist representation Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-11-22 María Esperanza Casullo, Rodolfo E. Colalongo
Populist representation is the process by which a body or set of bodies become the signifier of a powerful act of political transgression of the social order. We call this specific type of represen...
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C.W. Mills’ notion of the ‘social milieu’ and its relevance for contemporary society Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Keith Jacobs, Jeff Malpas
In Mills’ sociological analysis, a central notion is the ‘social milieu’ which encapsulates ‘the social setting of a person that is directly open to his personal experience’. For Mills, sociology s...
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Memorials to murdered women: A study of the dynamics of claiming, marking and making place in publics of commemoration Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Margaret Gibson, Kelly Burstow
This paper examines the emergence and trajectory of a vernacular femicide memorial tree at Mount Gravatt (Meanjin/Brisbane) which is juxtaposed with established and regulated official commemorative...
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The sonic framing of place: Microsociology, urban atmospheres and quiet hour shopping Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Eduardo de la Fuente, Michael James Walsh
In this article we examine the sonic framing of place. Our theoretical approach combines Goffman’s microsociology (and its sociology of music/sound studies off-shoots) with an account of sound in t...
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Lifestyle migration in place: Notes from the field Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Nick Osbaldiston, Caitlin Buckle
In this paper we seek to examine the quest for a better way of life through migration, known as lifestyle migration, by positioning place as the a priori condition through which this experience hap...
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Introduction to thinking place: Materiality, atmospheres and spaces of belonging Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-26 Eduardo de la Fuente, Margaret Gibson, Michael James Walsh, Magdalena Szypielewicz
This introduction positions the special issue by highlighting the inherent relationality of place as well as how place is not just an object of analysis but something that shapes thinking, writing ...
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The affective and sensory potencies of urban stone: Textures and colours, commemoration and geologic convivialities Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Tim Edensor
In drawing out how human lives are always already inextricably entangled with the non-human elements of the world, this paper explores how stone, as a constituent of urban materiality, provokes a w...
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Ketch Yorlye Daun Paradise: Sense of place, heritage and belonging in Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Zelmarie Cantillon, Sarah Baker
Senses of place are strongly intertwined with senses of heritage and cultural identity. Heritage places are distinctive not only for their tangible dimensions, but also the intangible qualities whi...
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Places of belonging, loneliness and lockdown Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Adrian Franklin, Bruce Tranter
We report new data from a survey of loneliness in Australia during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020–21, in order to identify those age groups most at risk of increased loneliness. Counter-intuitively...
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Socio-spatialities and affective atmospheres of COVID-19: A visual essay Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Deborah Lupton
The COVID-19 crisis has generated an intensity of feeling globally, as people’s everyday spatial and embodied practices have been continually disrupted and fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. In ...
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Places We Been Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-18 Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan
In response to the wonderful work of the editors and contributors to this special issue, we offer some combined reflections on the importance of place to the Thesis Eleven project, broadly defined,...
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Islam, Eurocentrism, and the question of jihadism Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Mohammed Sulaiman
This article offers a novel historical interpretation of the problem of jihadism through a critique of the philosophical foundations of Olivier Roy’s scholarship on Islam and jihadism. In particula...
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A symposium on Georg Simmel: Essays on art and aesthetics Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-09-22 Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Austin Harrington, Thomas Kemple, Nicola Marcucci
Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of aesthetic phenomena in general in social life. Yet Simmel’s essays in the area have remained dispers...
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Housekeeping of feelings: On Heller’s ethical aesthetics Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-09-22 Liu Can
This paper discusses Heller’s aesthetic ethics in her feeling theory. ‘Feeling’ is an aesthetic problem as well as an ethical problem. Heller discusses the important role of emotions in modern life...
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(De)facing the face of lecturing with Deleuze and Guattari Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Tyson E. Lewis
This paper articulates the separate accounts of facial education and lecturing found in A Thousand Plateaus in order to theorize a new concept of lecturing for a post-digital university. Many accou...
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Notes towards the critical theory of post-industrialism capitalism Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-07-29 J.F. Dorahy
This essay aims to continue to develop the thesis that the welter of political-economic, social, technological, and subjective transformations that characterized the final decades of the 20th centu...
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Incriminatory utopias: Utopian visions creating scapegoats Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-06-19 Kalli Drousioti, Marianna Papastephanou
Many utopian visions operate by scapegoating an Otherness. They blame an ‘enemy’ for an unbearable, dystopian current reality, holding the ‘enemy’ responsible for it or for obstructing the passage to a desired, new reality. Then they exclude (or even promise the elimination of) this ‘enemy’. Despite the renewed interest in utopias, such utopian frames remain theoretically neglected or, worse, they
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Decolonising (critical) social theory: Enfleshing post-Covid futurities Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-06-14 Sara C. Motta
Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological
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The ideal of freedom in the Anthropocene: A new crisis of legitimation and the brutalization of geo-social conflicts Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-06-06 Mikael Carleheden, Nikolaj Schultz
Modern social orders are legitimized by the ideal of freedom. Most conceptions of this ideal are theorized against the backdrop of nature understood as governed by its own laws beyond the realm of the social. However, such an understanding of nature is now being challenged by the ‘Anthropocene’ hypothesis. This article investigates the consequences of this hypothesis for freedom as an ideal legitimizing
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Constructing ‘others’ and a wider ‘we’ as emotional processes: A case of South Korea in times of crisis Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Jae-Eun Noh
This article examines how growing fears, insecurities and uncertainties during the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted an emotional distance from others. The aim is to explore how global solidarity and nationalism are challenged and constructed as collective emotional processes concerning ‘others’. Drawing on social theories of emotions during crises and emotions towards others, this study looks at policy
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Comparative moral economies of crisis Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-05-19 Benjamin Manning, Craig Browne
At times of crisis, existing institutional arrangements of societies are thrown into question. Crises that occur in multiple societies simultaneously present rare opportunities for comparative empirical analysis. Social theory can reveal the framing conditions of the responses to crises and the sources of variations between them. This paper compares the immediate responses of the Australian, UK and
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Comte’s posthumanist social science Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-05-16 Florence Chiew
Auguste Comte’s classical status in sociology and social theory is routinely taken to mean outdated. Coupled with this perception, there has been a pervasive tendency within contemporary discourse to presume a positivism that is largely rationalistic or scientistic and therefore critically and analytically useless. This paper explores how some of Comte’s lesser acknowledged perspectives on science
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Laclau on misunderstanding and the genesis of collective identity Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-05-12 Gavin Rae
This article defends Ernesto Laclau against the charge that his work, manifested most clearly in On Populist Reason, affirms an authoritarian politics to account for the genesis of collective identity. To outline this, I read Laclau’s thought through three logics – termed the logics of universal imposition, negation, and symbolic mediation – to argue that he rejects the first but adopts the latter
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Sovereignty, society and human rights: Theorising society and human survival in times of global crisis Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-04-12 Angela Leahy
The coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis have highlighted the power of governments in relation to people and the societies in which they live. This article looks at two sociological approaches that together capture the core features of the relationship between sovereignty, society and individual safety. Sociologists of human rights point to the importance of sovereignty for the enforcement of human
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Towards a tragic social science: Critique, translation, and performance Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Sam Han
Taking ‘the idea of the tragic’ as a point of departure, this article articulates an approach to sociology and social theory from the perspective of a ‘tragic vision’. In arguing for the relevance of ‘tragic thought’ for the analysis of contemporary crises, it suggests that ‘the tragic’ must be understood as a reflection of the long tail of the formation of a particular secular, modern ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’
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Book review: The Future is Feminine: Capitalism and the Masculine Disorder Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Peter Fleming
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Politics of fear, fury and emotional censorship in theatrical performance: Belarus Free Theatre Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Peta Tait
This article argues that political performance reveals the significance of the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood in relation to the censorship of democratic expression. Belarus Free Theatre performers spoke about fear as they gave personal accounts of imprisonment and undertook extreme physical action on aerial ropes, creating performances that evoked both emotionally felt responses and
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Book review: Durkheim and After: The Durkheimian Tradition, 1893–2020 Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-03-23 Matt Dawson
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Book review: A Hermeneutics of Violence: A Four-Dimensional Conception Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-03-22 Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson
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Monumental upheavals: Unsettled fates of the Captain Cook statue and other colonial monuments in Australia Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-02-08 Bronwyn Carlson, Terri Farrelly
Monuments and statues are forms of commemoration. They typically pay tribute to people or events and aim to serve as a permanent marker, a link between present and past generations, committing them to memory and assigning them with importance and meaning. While commemorations can be beneficial in terms of recognising a legacy of the past and helping foster relationships between opposing groups, they
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An emergent form of life? A vertical suburb in Italy, a liminal glimpse from within Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-01-31 Silvia Pierosara
This contribution explores a case study of a marginalized suburb in Italy called ‘Hotel House’ from three angles. First, I look at the historical and physical features of this particular building, which functions as a vertical multicultural neighbourhood. Second, I examine the paradoxical nature of this building type, which is exceedingly rare in Italy and Europe, in relation to (in)visibility and
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Book review: Warsaw Housing Cooperative: City in Action Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Franciszek Chwałczyk
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Book review: On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-01-18 Zak Kizer
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Correlating affect and emotion: Covidiquette and the expanding curation of online persona(s) Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-01-17 David Marshall
Over the last 25 years, major research in media and cultural studies has investigated the play of affect in our cultures. ‘Affect’, as a term derived from its neurophysiological and psychological origins, defines the particular movement of feeling from sensation to its attribution as an identifiable emotion. This article explores the way that ‘affect’ to emotion is being curated online by users particularly
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Upheaval and reinvention in celebrity interviews: Emotional reflexivity and the therapeutic self in late modernity Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-01-13 Anne-Maree Sawyer, Sara James
The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater
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Pandemic fiction as therapeutic play: The New York Times Magazine’s The Decameron Project (2020) Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2022-01-13 Stephanie Downes, Juliane Römhild
This article explores the therapeutic potential of narrative fiction during a global health crisis. We focus on The Decameron Project (2020), a collection of short fiction by writers from around the world, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine. The Decameron Project references the narrative framework established by Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-14th century, when the Black Death devastated Europe
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Why social scientists still need phenomenology Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2021-12-08 Christopher Houston
Pierre Bourdieu famously dismissed phenomenology as offering anything useful to a critical science of society – even as he drew heavily upon its themes in his own work. This paper makes a case for why Bourdieu’s judgement should not be the last word on phenomenology. To do so it first reanimates phenomenology’s evocative language and concepts to illustrate their continuing centrality to social scientists’
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Democracy, citizenship, and corporate governance reform: How to deal with the internationalization of corporate activity Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2021-11-23 Grahame Thompson
Commercial companies are increasingly being recognized as agents of societal governance operating alongside the public authorities in their traditional role as governance bodies. In addition, companies are claiming to be ‘corporate citizens’ in the way they deal with their environmental, employment and social/ethical responsibilities. Given the fact that large corporations are now heavily internationalized
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Whiteness, Judaism and the challenge of the postcolonial critique: A response to Rattansi Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2021-11-22 Matt Dawson
I wish to start by extending my thanks to Ali Rattansi for engaging with, and responding to, my article ‘The War Against Forgetfulness: Sociological Lessons from Bauman’s Writings on European Jewry’ (Dawson, 2020) and to Peter Beilharz as Editor of Thesis Eleven for providing space for our debate. I must confess, though, that I was somewhat confused upon reading Rattansi’s response. The reason for
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Masses on the stages of democracy: Democratic promises and dangers in self-dramatizations of masses Thesis Eleven Pub Date : 2021-11-15 Christiane Mossin
The political significance of masses is more obvious than ever. The aim of this article is to develop a conceptualization capable of capturing the dangerous (totalitarian) as well as promising (potentially emancipatory) aspects of masses. It argues that, intricately, the dangers and fruitful potentials of masses are born out of the same fundamental structural features. We may differentiate analytically