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Book forum: global libidinal economy Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2024-03-24 Ilan Kapoor, Gavin Fridell, Maureen Sioh, Pieter de Vries, Hasmet Uluorta, Hannah Richter, Christian Caiconte, María Gómez
This is a forum containing six short interventions on the 2023 co-authored book, Global Libidinal Economy. In the first intervention, the co-authors lay out their book’s key arguments. What follows...
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Another earth: An astronomical concept of the planet for the environmental humanities Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Lukáš Likavčan
Since the notion of the Anthropocene entered the discourse of environmental humanities, it has prompted multiple conceptual innovations. This paper focuses on one such case: the term planetary – an...
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Reaction value: affective reflex in the digital public sphere Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2024-03-20 William Davies
The concept of ‘reaction’ has been frequently viewed pejoratively in the history of social and moral theory, as unthinking and often resentful. But ‘reactions’ of various kinds play a central role ...
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Co-opting and being co-opted: on critiques of identity politics Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Andrei Belibou
In this paper, I analyze three categories of narratives that seek to understand identity politics’ role on the American left through the lens of co-optation. The first, represented primarily by Fre...
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Cornelius Castoriadis’ agonistic theory of the future of work at Amazon Mechanical Turk Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2024-02-27 Tim Christiaens
Digital innovations are rapidly changing the contemporary workplace. Big Tech companies marketing algorithmic management increasingly decide on the Future of Work. Political responses, however, oft...
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Theorizing is not abstraction but horizontal translation Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Michael Guggenheim
The literature on theorizing usually implicitly assumes that theorizing is writing. A recent focus on theoretical diagrams seeks to correct this idea. But even this focus on diagrams measures them ...
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Social figures as elements of sociological theorizing Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Tobias Schlechtriemen
Social figures are an inherently important but largely unnoticed element of sociological theorizing. Like other elements (such as metaphors, analogies, or diagrams), social figures have their own c...
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Rethinking political discourse in an ‘unhinged’ age Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Michael Chisnall
Where offered at all, current explanations of escalating political antagonism between right-wing extremists and progressives often rely on the idea that conflicting group opinions and beliefs have ...
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The biopolitics of fear: assessing Agamben’s analysis of the COVID-19 lockdowns Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Paul Gorby
This article provides a critical reading of Giorgio Agamben’s writings on the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures imposed by Western states. Taking the theme of fear to be central to Agamben’s inte...
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On heartbreak, livelihoods and art: affect and crip desire in art making assemblages Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-10-15 Kimberlee Collins, Chelsea Temple Jones, Carla Rice
This article explores the affective dimensions of disabled, D/deaf, mad, and neurodiverse artists’ work through a livelihoods framework informed by the social and tacit dimensions of heartbreak. He...
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Fascist uses of conspiracy theories: alienation, anxiety, and false concreteness in the critical political theory of Franz Neumann Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-10-15 Peter Chambers
Recent decades have seen are surgence in the use of conspiracy theories by populist and autocratic political figures. This has sat alongside a renewed interest in using insights from Frankfurt Scho...
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Theorizing from neglected cases Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Monika Krause
Some cases in the social sciences have been attributed a greater capacity to generate transferrable insights than others. This is evident in the phenomenon now widely diagnosed as Eurocentrism but ...
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Fame democracy? Social media and visuality-based transformation of the public sphere Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Eeva Luhtakallio, Taina Meriluoto
We argue that a shift in the underlying values that inform people’s actions in the public sphere is taking place in the social media age. From ways of qualifying the public sphere as a space that p...
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Theorizing together Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Tobias Werron, Jelena Brankovic, Leopold Ringel
The article outlines ideas for a methodology of collaborative theorizing. The first part introduces our understanding of theorizing as a craft that provides all scholars in the social sciences and ...
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Social theory and overinterpretation Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Isaac Ariail Reed
Theory is the use of abstraction in the pursuit of understanding. In the human sciences, theory is a talmudic process of reading and conceptual dispute that carries the colligation of evidentiary s...
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Sorting out economic forms: a field guide to contemporary capitalism Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-09-03 Alexander Dobeson, Saskia Brill, Veit Braun
ABSTRACT A series of recent works have put forward a post-commodification understanding of the contemporary economy as based on one central economic form. While this approach allows us to conceptualize the transformation of the economy around one particular type of valuable, it also suffers from conceptual monoculture, risking to overlook the specific relationships between different forms. To grasp
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The displacement of reality tests. The selection of individuals in the age of machine learning Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-08-07 Dominique Cardon, Jean-Marie John-Mathews
ABSTRACT This article presents an interpretation of the transformation of selection tests in our societies, such as competitive examinations, recruitment or competitive access to goods or services, based on the opposition between reality and world proposed by Luc Boltanski in On Critique. We would like to explore the change in the format of these selection tests. We argue that this change is made possible
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The politics of the unseen: speculative, pragmatic and nihilist hope in the anthropocene Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-19 David Chandler
ABSTRACT This paper explores hope as a dominant framing for critical social theory in the era of the Anthropocene. It suggests that with the dissolution of modernist assumptions of human exceptionality, universal causality and temporal progress, critical social theory can be understood as having shifted fields. This shift is from the field of the seen – the field of appearances (i.e. the world of politics
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Everyday sovereign exclusion: conceptualising police violence and deaths in custody as a racial production of homo sacer Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Louis Everuss
Although Giorgio Agamben figures prominently in research examining sovereign state-based exclusion, his theories are marked by two commonly identified limitations. The absolute nature of Agamben's ...
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The emotional in-formation of digital life: Simondon, individuation and affectivity Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Ian Tucker
ABSTRACT The current paper argues for an onto-genetic account of our relationships with digital technologies, that captures the excessive operation of data and the meta-stabilizing role of emotion in the operation of individuation. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s (2020a. Individuation in light of notions of form and information. Trans. T. Adkins. London: University of Minnesota Press; 2020b. Individuation
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A science of stereotypes: paranoiac-critical forays within the medium of information Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Fabian Muniesa
ABSTRACT Contemporary cultures of information technology are particularly propitious to the construction and propagation of stereotypes, and, hence, to the cultural critique thereof. Should that critique take at face value the vernaculars of information and behaviour that this culture affords? Or should it attempt at distorting those vernaculars, so to confront from a different angle the latent problem
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Addiction phobia: Foucault, abstract governance, and the fascination with materiality in contemporary critical studies of addiction Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Fredrik Palm
This article explores how the field of critical addiction studies – which can be traced back to the late twentieth century – has used Foucauldian social theory on governance to challenge dominant b...
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The algorithmic big Other: using Lacanian theory to rethink control and resistance in platform work Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Leon A. Salter, Mohan J. Dutta
ABSTRACT Despite burgeoning literature on platform work, there has been a lack of scholarship which carefully considers what we mean by the terms control and (particularly) resistance in the context of algorithmic management. This article draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to take a step back and interrogate what exactly we mean by these terms in a setting where increasingly the entity being resisted
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Introduction to thematic section on ‘social theory in an age of machine learning’ Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Christian Borch
Published in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Theorizing exclusionary and inclusionary people-making: from narrative genres to collective learning processes Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Marcos Engelken-Jorge, Bernhard Forchtner, Özgür Özvatan
ABSTRACT The article offers a normatively-informed theorization of people-making as a (blocked) collective learning process. More specifically, people-making, namely the mobilization of individuals into a collective actor, draws symbolic boundaries around the sovereign, thereby contributing to the imagination of ‘the people’ in more inclusionary or exclusionary ways. To account for differences along
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(Un)Fixing habitus: affective transactions and the becoming body Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-07-06 Jonathan G. Heaney
ABSTRACT How might emotional life be best explained and accounted for in sociological theory? How is it that phenomena that seem so subjectively fleeting, and fundamentally individual nevertheless display remarkable relationality and regularity? Recent work in sociology and the social sciences attempts to address such questions from a variety of conflicting perspectives, some of which foregrounds the
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Immanent obligations of response: articulating everyday response-abilities through care Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Lydia Baan Hofman
ABSTRACT The geological epoch of the Anthropocene provokes the reconceptualization of responsibility as response-ability. Going beyond bounded individualism and human exceptionalism, this notion emphasizes the constitutive relationality of heterogeneous more than human beings that allows for response. Feminist STS scholar and biologist Donna Haraway has developed response-ability primarily as an epistemological
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Feminist counterpublics and media activism in contemporary France Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Juan Pecourt
ABSTRACT In this work, I shall analyse the transformation of media activism in the field of French feminist counterpublics, from the 1970s to the present. Based on Jürgen Habermas’s and Nancy Fraser’s conception of the public sphere, and centred on the French case, I shall study the passage from a pre-digital feminist counterpublic, defined by intellectual journals and theoretical debates (1970s),
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The touch of the leader: representation and responsiveness in plebiscitary leader democracy Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Gábor Illés, András Körösényi
ABSTRACT By conjoining theorizing and analyzing existing empirical research results, the article aims at situating representation and responsiveness within the Weberian notion of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD). In unison with the ‘sensorial turn’ in political theory, it proceeds by adopting the touch metaphor as an analytical lens to help us capture aspects of responsiveness in contemporary PLD
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The aleatory moment of finance and the structural production of class-based inequality Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-05-24 Niamh Mulcahy
ABSTRACT This article considers the conceptual role that contingency plays in class-based inequality, by examining financial insecurity in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis, austerity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Althusser’s aleatory materialism, I counter postmodern and poststructuralist ideas of contingency as a universally disruptive challenge to power and stratification, showing
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Differentiating natures, connecting environments pragmatic sociology and the emergence of green justifications Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Tomi Lehtimäki, Mikko J. Virtanen
ABSTRACT As the environmental crisis gains pace, different strands of posthumanist theorizing have aimed to reshape the ecological conditions of human actions. This article examines ecological justifications in French pragmatic sociology, developed by Boltanski and Thévenot, situating it to discussions about materiality. The approach has proven useful for analyzing various controversies as it provides
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Some-any: approximating personalization in contemporary ensembles Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Adrian Mackenzie
ABSTRACT The paper situates personalization by comparing widely used numbering practices on social media and other digital platforms. It draws on A.N. Whitehead's analysis of approximation to identify how probabilities and hashes, two key approximating practices, combine to configure platforms and individual users. It shows how personalization in a typical social media setting, the Instagram Explore
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YouTube personalities as infrastructure: assets, attention choreographies and cohortification processes Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Emily Rosamond
ABSTRACT YouTube, the world’s most popular online video sharing and social media platform, is filled with personalities. Lifestyle bloggers, hobbyists, self-styled newscasters and exercise instructors add flair to what they share, carving out a niche in a crowded field. Typically, personality is understood as something that belongs to its bearer. But how might it be possible to analyze YouTube, starting
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Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: the extimacy of ecological catastrophe in Donut County Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-03-12 Benjamin Nicoll
ABSTRACT Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving jouissance, or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. This article contends that videogames are the ideal medium
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From senses to sensors: autonomous cars and probing what machine learning does to mobilities studies Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-03-12 Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren, Alexander Paulsson
ABSTRACT Cars are nowadays being programmed to learn how to drive themselves. While autonomous cars are often portrayed as the next step in the auto-motive industry, they have already begun roaming the streets in some US cities. Building on a growing body of critical scholarship on the development of autonomous cars, we explore what machine learning is in open environments like cities by juxtaposing
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More-than-human gender performativity Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-03-02 Anne-Sofie Dichman
ABSTRACT This article engages with Judith Butler’s concepts of gender performativity and materiality as they develop from Bodies That Matter (1993) to The Force of Nonviolence (2020). The article shows how Butler has moved toward a materialism that is less dependent on language and thus open for animals and other nonhuman creatures to become intelligible as liveable lives. At the same time, however
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Situating machine learning – On the calibration of problems in practice Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Richard Groß, Susann Wagenknecht
ABSTRACT In this paper, we employ John Dewey’s notion of the situation as an analytic lens for observing and theorizing machine learning. Based on two ethnographic case studies in art and science, we account for machine learning as practice and examine the dynamics of the situations it gives rise to. Following Dewey, our observations focus on the transformation of situations from an initial state of
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Parklife and the public: 40 years of personalization in the United Kingdom Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-02-13 William Viney
ABSTRACT This article historicises practices called ‘personalization’ in the UK. It presents data from interviews with practitioners to show how business leaders, public sector managers, policy analysts, activists and others have crafted their personalizing practices through commercial and governmental work over a 40-year period. These public histories are illuminated by professional biographies, which
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Universality, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Uprising Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Jason C. Mueller
This article offers a theoretically informed case study of the George Floyd Uprising that emerged in May 2020. In addition to analyzing details of the uprising, it illustrates the ways in which par...
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Personalization: a new political arithmetic? Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2023-01-04 Sophie Day, Celia Lury, Helen Ward
ABSTRACT Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence
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Avengers’ anti-Oedipal endgame Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Erdoğan H. Şima, Ali Rıza Taşkale
ABSTRACT How do we deal with the inescapability of the political present? In making sense of an all too binding temporality such as the Anthropocene, we seem to find a standpoint in the crisis of the human agency. This political convenience is arguably what the Avengers’ endgame exposes: they survive their failing powers insofar as they ironize their agency. This article critically engages with our
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Hyperproduction: a social theory of deep generative models Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Fabian Ferrari, Fenwick McKelvey
ABSTRACT Platformized cultural production is in flux. Artificial intelligence is often seen as a key driving force of this shift. This article examines the proliferation of AI-generated media to introduce a new concept to theorize cultural production: hyperproduction. This notion designates the penetration of cultural life with deep generative models. Juxtaposing two empirical use cases–autonomous
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Toward a critique of neo-republican reason: the subject, discursive control, and power in Pettit’s political theory Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-12-04 Liam Farrell
This article examines the concept of ‘discursive control’ as a feature of the personality of the subject of non-domination as it appears within Pettit’s theory of politics and practical reasoning. ...
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COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptions – a case for postfoundational critique Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-09-19 Hannah Richter
Published in Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (Vol. 23, No. 2-3, 2022)
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Giorgio Agamben's political formalism Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-09-18 Arne De Boever
ABSTRACT This article takes as its point of departure Agamben's comments about how sovereign nation-states responded to the pandemic – by requiring people to wear masks, socially distance, work from home and live under lockdown. Agamben has characterized such measures as ‘fascist’ and has been criticized for that characterization. Against the inflationary critical value of Agamben's ‘camp’ as a paradigm
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An evental pandemic: thinking the COVID-19 ‘event’ with Deleuze and Foucault Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Jemima Repo, Hannah Richter
ABSTRACT As COVID-19 swept the world it also became the subject of a quickly growing body of theoretical scholarship aimed at understanding the social, political and economic implications of the ‘pandemic event’. Taking a step back, this paper draws on Deleuze and Foucault to interrogate whether, and in what way, the COVID-19 pandemic can and should in fact be understood as an event. We first offer
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Critique, clinic, and care in times of COVID Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-06-19 Emma Ingala
ABSTRACT Critique has been recently accused of not being able to respond to the challenges of our times, such as the climate emergency and the pandemic crisis. The new materialisms, which have posited themselves as a corrective to critique’s alleged overinflation of culture and language by proposing a (re)turn to matter, affirm that ours is a post-critical era. Against this diagnosis, the aim of this
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Low-skill no more! essential workers, social reproduction and the legitimacy-crisis of the division of labour Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-06-15 Sara R. Farris, Mark Bergfeld
ABSTRACT Workers in the realm of social reproduction – e.g. nurses, carers, cleaners, food preparation workers etc. – are considered low-skill and are poorly remunerated. During the Covid-19 crisis they have been recast as ‘essential’, leading to unprecedented praise and attention in public discourse. Nonetheless, public praise for these ‘essential’ workers so far has not translated into a commitment
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What is COVID capitalism? Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-06-14 Thomas Nail
ABSTRACT The term ‘COVID capitalism’ designates the ways capitalism and the novel coronavirus alter and amplify one another. In this paper, I look at four major features that characterize this relationship so far. (1) Capitalist extraction and urbanization increase exposure to new viruses. (2) Capitalism increases the spread of infectious disease. (3) COVID amplifies inequalities that benefit capitalists
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Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-06-14 Mark Muhannad Ayyash
ABSTRACT This article examines the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine both in Palestine and globally through a decolonial lens. In dominant Euro-American discourse, the invention, production, and distribution of the vaccine is largely judged as an indicator of sophisticated and advanced health care systems and economies. The underlying premise being that the advanced, wealthy, and capable nation-states
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The biopolitical economy of the COVID-19 pandemic and the possibilities for an affirmative biopolitics Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-05-12 Ali Rıza Taşkale
ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is in threefold. First, it focuses on the workings and operations of the biopolitical economy. Second, it explores how the pandemic has exposed the thanatopolitical tendency of neoliberal capitalism, particularly in the form of herd immunity. Herd immunity deploys death as one of the instruments, making plain that the valuation of life is based on its sacrificability
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Citizenship by vitality: rethinking the concept of health citizenship Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Mikko Jauho, Ilpo Helén
In this article, we develop a concept of health citizenship that is specific, historically informed, and flexible to use in the analysis of different domains of medicine and healthcare. Our startin...
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Redefining ‘safe bodies’: queering the shifting body politics during the COVID-19 pandemic Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Dhriti Shankar
ABSTRACT Bodily safety during the post-covid ‘new normal’ is a fraught, but phantasmal notion, subject to manipulation by both institutional and non-institutional power structures. Looking at the Indian context, a queerer understanding of the pandemic is required at a time when bodily relations have been queered by numerous instances where new forms of non-economic social stratification are discernible
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Democratic politics in virulent times: three vital lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-05-03 Mads Ejsing, Derek Denman
ABSTRACT This article offers three lessons for a post-pandemic democratic politics. First, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deep ontological entanglements of human and non-human systems: A submicroscopic agent jumping from an animal to a human host impacts human societies across the world. In the process, the virus has revealed a second lesson: Public responses to the pandemic have exacerbated
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Sublimating the commodity Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-05-03 Todd McGowan
ABSTRACT Capitalism channels the subject’s sublimation into the commodity, which causes the subject to misidentify the nature of its freedom. The self-limiting freedom of sublimation becomes the unlimited freedom to do anything of the commodity form. Self-limiting freedom becomes liberal freedom. The liberal notion of freedom is a foundational misconception build into the commodity form itself. Even
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Derrida, autoimmunity, and critique Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Gavin Rae
ABSTRACT This paper outlines and engages with Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘autoimmunity’ to argue that it offers a unique resource for understanding the potential for critique inherent in and resultant from the COVID-19 pandemic. I first offer a brief genealogy of the terms ‘immunity/autoimmunity’ to show how they operate in biological, philosophical, and socio-political discourses, before outlining
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Beyond fairness: the COVID-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-03-20 George Sotiropoulos
ABSTRACT The paper sets out to explore the significance of the concept of environmental justice for a critical study of the Covid-19 pandemic. This task involves questioning the prevailing equation of justice with fairness, the limits of which have become manifest during the pandemic. In its place, a more holistic conceptualization is required, which registers the material environment as a constitutive
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When masses re-individualize: affect, contagion and control in digital modernity Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-03-13 Raymond L.M. Lee
ABSTRACT Loss of selfhood may be considered one of the most enduring assumptions in writings on crowds and masses. The contemporary idea of the social avalanche makes plain this expectation that no person can easily withstand the de-individualizing changes wrought by the momentum of collective forces. Individuals become the proverbial herd-like non-selves in those overwhelming moments. Yet the affective
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Interfacing the human/machine Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2022-01-23 Benjamin Lipp, Sascha Dickel
Contemporary discourse on information and communication technology suggests that humans and machines are increasingly converging. However, in this article, we argue that for analysts of digital soc...
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Affect and reason in divided societies: entanglement, conflict, possibility Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory Pub Date : 2021-12-14 Lars Tønder
ABSTRACT This essay introduces the special issue on affect and reason in deeply divided societies. Common to all essays in the special issue is a shared belief that political and social theory need a new framework for analyzing the relationship between affect and reason. This goes especially for societies marked by ever-growing cleavages, ethnic diversity, ideological struggles, and deep political