Issue 190, October 2025 – New Views From China – Postgraduate Perspectives From Chengdu

This special issue is a product of over a decade of collaboration between Thesis Eleven and Sichuan University’s College of Literature and Journalism. The issue provides a platform for emerging Chengdu scholars and developed around the idea that this younger generation of Masters students might consider writing less directly in their immediate fields of research and more in terms of general and personal interest. It offers a window into some of the concerns and patterns of thinking of the next generation and the worlds that they inhabit, where tradition and modernity intersect.

Issue 189, August 2025 – Annihilation Aesthetics: The Disappearances of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This special issue looks at the importance of imaginaries of total destruction – what we are electing to call annihilation aesthetics. The volume considers the historical present of technologically enabled violence, dealing in the process with concerns about mass terror and mediatisation, the logics of technological violence from the nuclear to the artificial age and the importance of culture in developing a viable critique.

Issue 188, June 2025 – Theoretical Logic in Cultural Sociology: Social Theorists Discuss Jeffrey Alexander’s Lifework

Within American cultural sociology, Jeffrey Alexander’s strong program has emerged as the strongest attractor in the field. Having made a name as a social theorist before moving into cultural sociology, Alexander has been able to deploy his own approach both as a general sociology of culture in the neo-Durkheimian tradition, and as a sociological theory of the middle range that can be applied over and over again in case studies that show how codes, meanings and performances bring society together, or drive it apart.

Issue 187, April 2025 – Challenging Rationalities of the Ecumene

Contributors: Slawomir Czapnik and Tomasz Krawczyk, Howard Prosser, Ricardo P Regatieri and Lucas Trindade, Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen, Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati, Bernardo Paci, Sonny Osman, Henrique Augusto Alexandre, Janine Gertz, Theresa Petray, Miriam Jorgensen, Alison Vivian and Coralie Achterberg, Raymond Grenfell and Fausto Butta, Mathijs van de Sande and Gaard Kets, Franz-Josef Deiters, David Roberts, and Edmund Mendelssohn

Issue 186, February 2025 – Critical Theory, Aesthetics and Speculative Philosophy: A Special Edition on the Thought of Gillian Rose

This special edition of Thesis Eleven focuses on the thought of British philosopher and critical theorist Gillian Rose. With contributions focusing on Rose’s political thought, her literary and aesthetic philosophy, and her engagement with Hegel, this edition hopes to further establish Rose’s work as part of the canon of late 20th century philosophy. Additionally, this issue also contains an interview with New School critical theorist Jay Bernstein, who was close friends with Rose, as well her previously unpublished lecture, “Does Marx Have a Method?”