Articles

Articles

Online essays and prepublication articles from Thesis Eleven Journal. You can find the final published versions here


Some contexts of Jeremy Beckett 1931-2022

by Tim Rowse Jeremy Beckett died in Sydney 8 December 2022. Thesis Eleven is proud to honour his memory with this appreciation of Jeremy and his work, revised by Tim Rowse from an earlier version published in Encounters with Indigeneity: Writing about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. We are grateful to both Tim Rowse and…

Remembering Riaz Hassan 1937–2022

by Iván Szelényi Riaz Hassan passed away in Melbourne on June 8, 2022 after a long illness. His is a great loss to the Australian social sciences and to the social sciences in general. Riaz was a great scholar, a wonderful colleague, a good friend and an excellent teacher. He was the mentor of a…

Retrospective: Harry Redner – Pursuing Philosophy as a Vocation

by Jill Redner For Harry, philosophy was a vocation in Weber’s sense. But pursuing this ideal in today’s technocratic multiversity can seem almost quixotic, because specialist knowledge and technical expertise are cultivated, rather than a general intellectual grasp of problems affecting humanity. Generalists still exist but are increasingly likely to find themselves dismissed as mere…

Extract: The Birth of Science from the Spirit of Art

by Harry Redner Section I. The origin of the natural sciences in music and painting. Western achievements in the arts and sciences began with the Greeks. During the great age of Classical civilization, that of the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, the basis was laid for all the later achievements in the…

Extract: Theorybabble

by Harry Redner The history of Theorybabble is now well-known to everyone and is an often-told story that need not preoccupy us unduly. It arose in the hothouse atmosphere of the avant gardist intellectual circles of the Paris of the 1960s and 70s. But it only really flourished in the American elite universities of the…

Extract: West and East

by Harry Redner We are now undergoing a historic transformation in the destiny of mankind that is in many ways as decisive as any of those in the historic past, perhaps as far back as the Neolithic Revolution. For the very first time in history mankind has come together in a global society that some…

Matthew Barker on Alfonso Lingis: ‘The bodies that touch us’

by Matthew Barker Alfonso Lingis asks the reader in the opening paragraph of Bodies That Touch Us: “are the bodies we touch really the bodies described by phenomenology?” (p.159). His question probes the limits of the possibilities of description vis a vis the actual body described. To answer the question, Lingis wanders through selected phenomenological…

The Carnival is Over

by Howard Prosser “Carnivals in History” (1981) is the only article Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published in Thesis Eleven. The piece’s appearance, then and now, arguably says more about the journal than it does the esteemed historian. Having him appear in its early pages was a coup for the new publication. Other big names followed.…

Article: Where are we home? Revisited

by Katie Terezakis Home is a loaded idea. Call to mind the common sayings: home is where the heart is, you can never go home again, etc. The abundance of mottoes doesn’t dampen the sentiment; the idea of home remains charged with longing for a place we knew or hope to create.

If The Beatles had read Heller

by Mark Davis It’s an evocative theme, a ‘Top 40’. A little alarmingly for some listening no doubt, Thesis Eleven was first conceived the year I was born, 1978. Growing up here in the UK during the 1980s, encountering the ‘Top 40’ meant listening to the radio (later watching TV) to learn which songs had…

Jack Palmer on ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’

by Jack Palmer I first read ‘The Making and Unmaking of Strangers’ where it is republished in Postmodernity and its Discontents, a collection of wide-ranging and loosely connected essays. A form typical of this stage of his work. Some of them are transcripts from lectures delivered at invited and esteemed lectures (the Manchester Annual Peace…

John Grumley on George Márkus’s ‘Four Forms of Critical Theory’

by John Grumley George Márkus’s Four Forms of Critical Theory was first published in Thesis Eleven no. 1 in 1980. Reading it again meant revisiting a paper that I had first read forty years ago with fresh eyes. I always thought George was a special person and a great philosopher. He supervised my PhD and…

Stuart Macintyre 1947-2021

by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski Stuart Macintyre died in Melbourne on 22 November 2021. He was one of the leading Australian historians of our times, an inspiring scholar, a culture builder, and endless source of generosity and enthusiasm for the work of history as well as the social sciences. A young Althusserian, all those…

Maria Markus’ ‘Lovers and Friends’: In lieu of a conversation

by Harry Blatterer I encountered Maria’s paper on friendship for the first time as an undergraduate student, so quite some time before it was finally published in Thesis Eleven as part of a Festschrift collection in celebration of Maria’s work. I remember that first encounter vividly.

Article: My Own Private Utopia

by Peter Beilharz Utopia has always been part of my world, ever since I started thinking about it. Was this 1968? A little after, later in high school. Utopia seemed ubiquitous; the possibilities of new worlds abundant

Article: Johann Arnason’s unanswered question by Peter Wagner

Johann Arnason’s unanswered question: To what end does one combine historical-comparative sociology with social and political philosophy? by Peter Wagner This article is a special prepublication of an article forthcoming in Thesis Eleven Journal

COVID-19: CODA

by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski (Melbourne) Covid-19 has taken over the world, taken over everything including our waking everyday lives, our dreamlives, our scholarship and future institutional funding logistics. Our friend and collaborator from Jozi, Peter Vale, provoked this special project in insisting that we must respond, call out members of our global network…

Cuba: autocratic governance and pandemic juncture

by Johanna Cilano Pelaez (Mexico) While COVID-19 has impacted all of Latin America, Cuba has faced it from its own particular situation. The state’s ability to control the main resources of the economy and regulate social behaviour – important for the implementation of mitigating measures at a pandemic juncture – goes hand in hand with…

Covid Disaster in America and the World

by Craig Calhoun (Tempe, Arizona) The disaster in America points to hard truths about Covid that matter everywhere. Covid strikes rich countries as well as poor, powerful as well as weak. Vulnerability that does not map neatly onto old divisions of developed from underdeveloped or imperialist from post-colonial. Its impact is shaped by pre-existing social…

Eleven theses or hypotheses on the way out of the pandemic

by Michel Wieviorka (Paris) How to think about the post-pandemic? This is not a simple question. The phenomenon is global, since it concerns the whole world, but its treatment is mainly national, with considerable differences from one country to another. The pandemic is not static but moving. Paradoxically it may well be long-lasting, since we…

What Is a Crisis?

by Phumlani Pikoli (Johannesburg) Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has been in a state of panic, fearing the unprecedented times we face. The idea that the pandemic has induced some pre-pubescent existential crisis is laughable, however. As the world has been forced to sit and reckon with its own systemic failures…

Postcards from the Covid-19 pandemic

by Simon Marginson The Covid-19 pandemic is instructive for social theory. It is like a gigantic experiment. It is not a controlled experiment, but a universal condition that enables differentiation on the basis of time and space, both geographical and discursive. It is possible to compare society before and during the pandemic, and also to…

Possible Futures, Now

by Tawana Kupe (Pretoria) Drawing from both traditions, universities are trying understand how it was that science largely missed the signs of Covid’s coming, and so fulfil their obligation to secure the long-term future of humanity on this planet. But they know, too, that the university must rise to the immediate challenges of global health,…

Noticias educativas from the international Mexican newsroom

by Alonso Casanueva Baptista The secretariat of public education in Mexico – the institution in charge of the standardized schooling practices there – organized for the current semester to take place via radio, internet, but most importantly, television. From August 24th to the end of the school year (July 2021), thirty million Mexican students will…

Between the acts: at home in uncertain times

by Timothy Andrews In the current pandemic, we find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Virginia Woolf’s audience in Between the Acts. Forced into our homes as a result of lockdown measures, a mirror is held up to us so that we can see the intimacy of our lives under the stark light…