Thesis Eleven Journal

Journal

Thesis Eleven (Thesis 11) is a multidisciplinary journal that publishes works on critical theories of modernity. Peer reviewed and published bimonthly, the journal reflects the broad scope of social theory by encouraging analysis on a wide range of topics across sociology, history, philosophy, political science, geography, cultural studies, literature and cognate fields. The identity of the journal, like its location, is multiple: European in the continental sense, but also transatlantic and antipodean. The journal translates European social theory, mainstream and marginal, and it also takes theory from the margins of the world system to the centres. Marxist in origin, after Marx by necessity, the journal is vitally concerned with change as well as with tradition.

Thesis Eleven is published by Sage Journals and can be accessed on Sage’s Thesis Eleven portal




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…

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…

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…

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…

Issue 184-185, December 2024 – Reading, Ethics and Society

Contributors: Alain Caillé, José Fernando Andrade Costa, Jorge Sola, Christine Magerski, Rafael Alvear, Céline Charlotte Casmir, Sean Braune, Chris Rojek, Jake Sokolofsky, Bernardo Paci, Gavin Rae, Mikkel Thorup, Alexander Kruglov and John Lechte

Issue 182, June 2024 – Cultures of Paradox

Contributors: Domonkos Sik, Mathew Abbott, Nikos Nikoletos, Fabian Cabaluz, Tomás Torres López, Harry Blatterer, Panu Minkkinen, Peter Beilharz and Frédéric Vandenberghe

Issue 181, April 2024 – Secularizing Trends

Contributors: José Maurício Domingues, Daniel Cunningham, Wojciech Engelking, Mads Ejsing, Kristian Bondo Hansen and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Luyang Zhou, Emanuel Copilaş, Peter Beilharz, Andrew Wells, Nicola Marcucci

Issue 180, February 2024 – Aesthetics enlightened

Contributors: David Roberts, Rob Shields and Nicholas Hardy, Thembisa Waetjen, Johan Trovik, Eduardo Enríquez Arévalo, Lorenzo Veracini and Dan Tout, Loïc Wacquant and Dieter Vandebroeck, Jonathan Fardy, Zeger Polhuijs, and Peter J Verovšek

Issue 177, August 2023 – Reflections on the Pandemic

This special issue revisits the Thesis Eleven online project: Living and Thinking Crisis. The original project published close to fifty contributions; a multimedia presentation that included postcards, words, poems and music responding to the pandemic in the real-time of its making. This issue of the journal brings a selection of these to publication and reflects…

Issue 176, June 2023 – Archipelago of forms

Contributors: Virgilio Rivas, Jon Stratton, Chris Barker, Amos Netzer, Peter Beilharz, Stuart Macintyre, Keith Tribe, Andrew Feenberg, Ian H. Angus, Joshua M Makalintal, John Lechte and Dániel Havrancsik

Issue 173, December 2022 – Fighting with the Other

Contributors: Emre Amasyalı, John A. Hall, Mohammed Sulaiman, Kalli Drousioti, Marianna Papastephanou, María Esperanza Casullo, Rodolfo E. Colalongo, Loïc Wacquant, Michael Wayne, Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Austin Harrington, Thomas Kemple, Nicola Marcucci, Christine Magerski, Angie Sassano, J.F. Dorahy

Issue 170, April 2022 – Including Special Section: Living in Crisis

This special section is the result of a online workshop called ‘Living in Crisis’ hosted by the TASA Social Theory thematic group and Thesis Eleven in 2020. Attendees were invited to think about the relationship between social theory and crisis in two ways. First, how can social theory be utilised to unpack what is happening…

Issue 169, April 2022 – Upheaval: Affect, Emotion and Practice in Times of Crisis

The essays in this thematic issue reflect on late 20th- and 21st-century figurations of ‘upheaval’ to measure the affective and emotional dimensions of some of the most complex challenges of our times. In exploring the discursive potency of the term ‘upheaval’ itself they attend collectively to an ‘optics’ of upheaval – that is, to the…

Issue 166, October 2021: Nomads of critique

Contributors: Peter Hudis, Alison Ross, Esperança Bielsa, Jodie Lee Heap, Andrea Lanza, Gerard Delanty, Neal Harris, Ali Rıza Taşkale, Jeremy Smith, Kevin Blachford, Eduardo de la Fuente, Wayne Hudson, John Lechte, J. F. Dorahy, Gary Pearce, Henry Paternoster, Chamsy el-Ojeili, Andrew Simon Gilbert, Greg Melleuish

Issue 165, August 2021: Misconnections

Jeffrey C. Alexander, Victor Weisbrod, James Kent, Olmo Gölz, Alan Scott, Clive Gabay, Katariina Kaura-aho, Sighard Neckel, Jon Stratton, Fu Qilin, Katie Terezakis

Issue 164, June 2021: Populism(s) II

How will populism research evolve in the coming years? Whilst the field has expanded dramatically and – as this issue shows – there remains substantial room for theoretical and empirical contributions, it is also true that forthcoming scholarship will need to grapple with less predictable events and trajectories.

Thesis Eleven 40th Birthday: The Top 40

Thesis Eleven turns 40 this year! We have thought about how to celebrate the momentous occasion with our readers in a way that responds to the times and does away with the distance. So, we want to send this virtual community of reading a gift: forty articles to represent the forty years of editorial efforts,…

Issue 163, April 2021: Philosophy and the Far Right

The articles collected here hail from two public events in November 2019. The first event specifically addressed philosophy and the Far-Right. The second, more interdisciplinary event looked at the global dimensions of the return of the Far-Right in the new millennium, bringing together historians, philosophers, critical theorists, criminologists, and political scientists

Issue 162, February 2021: Postcolonial world literature

How worldly is the postcolonial? How postcolonial is the world? These and other, related questions are at the centre of this issue of Thesis Eleven, that brings together some contributions to an international conference that the editors of this volume organized in March 2018 at the University of Delhi.

Issue 161, December 2020 Castoriadis Ex Nihilo

With this issue, Thesis Eleven is 40 years old. Who would have thunk? The day John Lennon was murdered, we picked up the boxes in Julian Triado’s Renault 12, news on the radio, axles groaning, us, I suppose, otherwise elated, but also in shock. What were these new times? This issue, guest edited by Vrasidis…

Issue 160, October 2020 György Márkus, Our Contemporary

This special issue features papers delivered at the 2018 International Conference on Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe held at Sichuan University, Chengdu. The issue features essays authored by the late Agnes Heller who was the keynote speaker at this event.

Issue 159, August 2020 Eastern European Marxist Critical Theory

This special issue features papers delivered at the 2018 International Conference on Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe held at Sichuan University, Chengdu. The issue features essays authored by the late Agnes Heller who was the keynote speaker at this event.

Issue 156, Feb 2020 – Thinking in Dark Times with Zygmunt Bauman

In this special issue of Thesis Eleven, we are marking just over three years since the death of Zygmunt Bauman by bringing together some of the contributions to that programme in order to revisit, elaborate, and crucially to extend his intellectual archive.

Remembering Keith Tester 1960 – 2019

The memoirs below form a prepublication version of a special memorial edition of Thesis Eleven celebrating the life and work of our close friend and colleague Keith Tester. Contributions by: Peter Beilharz, Kieran Flanagan, Mark Davis, Jack Palmer, Trevor Hogan, Sian Supski, Izabela Wagner, John Carroll, Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Arne Johan Vetlesen. You can…

Issue 155, December 2019 – Placing literature: Narrative, metaphor, critique

John Kinsella is widely known as an ‘international regionalist’, activist, anarchist, poet, novelist. The publication of his work in Thesis Eleven is an auspicious occasion for us. The journal has long published writing about literature, its politics and performance. Here we present the act in literature itself.

Issue 154, October 2019 – The Sociology of Randall Collins

Randall Collins is arguably one of the world’s leading social theorists and one of the most prominent American sociologists. This special issue aims to go further in order to explore different aspects of Collins’s work, including his theories of violence, interaction ritual chains, credential society, conflict sociology, nationalism, geo-political change and his sociology of emotions…

Issue 153, August 2019 Utopia Inverted: Günther Anders, Technology and the Social

This small glimpse of the formative contexts and personal and intellectual networks that shaped the trajectory of Anders’s work as a thinker, poet, and literary author gives a sense of how Anders’s writings can be mapped back onto the intellectual landscape of the 20th century in multiple and often unexpected ways.1 Over the last 25…

Issue 151, April 2019 Maria Markus. In Memoriam

Maria Markus. In Memoriam Issue 151, April 2019.

It is now eight years since Thesis Eleven published a Festschrift for Maria Márkus. Since then things have changed. Maria died over a year ago in September 2017. The world has been over-turned too.

Issue #148 October – Utopia in Chaos

Utopia in Chaos Volume 148 Issue 1, October 2018 Articles: (Plebiscitary) leader democracy: The return of an illusion? Alan Scott There is a revival of notions of leader democracy (LD) and plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD) both at the level of politics (e.g. the rhetoric of strong leadership) and in academic debate. This paper focuses largely…

Issue 146, June 2018

Issue 146, June 2018. Imagination and the Colonisation of lifeworlds. Featuring: Mark Harrison, Gerasimos Karavitis, Clayton Fordahl, Axel Fliethmann, Lachlan Ross, Andrew Gilbert, Chamsy el-Ojeili and Harry Blatterer

Issue 145, April 2018

Modes of indigenous modernity: Identities, stories, pathways Issue 145, April 2018 This special issue is the outcome of a collaborative venture – a three-day workshop between La Trobe University and Ateneo de Manila University, held in Manila. It brought together indigenous and non-indigenous researchers from both the Philippines and Australia and included aboriginal researchers in…

Issue 144, February 2018

Issue 144 Antinomies, Conflicts, Dialectics and Harmonies – on China, Adorno, suburban subcultures and more…

Issue 143, December 2017

Contemporary Perspectives on Critical Theory and Social Systems Theory Guest Editors: Hans-Georg Moeller and Mario Wenning. Including an exchange between Agnes Heller and Jürgen Habermas