Thesis Eleven Journal

Journal

Thesis Eleven Journal publishes theories and theorists, surveys, critiques, debates and interpretations. The journal also brings together articles on place, region, or problems in the world today, encouraging civilizational analysis and work on alternative modernities from fascism and communism to Japan and Southeast Asia. Marxist in origin, post-Marxist 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 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

Issue 141, August 2017

Performative Jozi Guest Editors: Noëleen Murray and Peter Vale

Issue 139, April 2017

Empires and Nation-states. This introduction to a special issue focuses on the complex and contradictory relationships of empires and nation-states. It contests the traditional views that posit nation-states and empires as the mutually exclusive forms of state organization. The paper identifies the key features of these two ideal types and then briefly reviews the current…

György Markus: In Memoriam

György Markus: In Memoriam John Grumley – John Rundell – David Roberts – Bolívar Echeverría

Issue 138, February 2017

Critical theory of technology and STS And György Markus: In Memoriam

Issue 137, December 2016

Unease with Civilization: Elias, Koselleck, Alexander Articles The unease with civilization Nicole Pepperell Abstract: Norbert Elias’s concept of the civilizing process is perhaps the most controversial aspect of his work, attracting frequent criticism for its perceived Eurocentrism, as well as impassioned defences that critics have misunderstood the concept. In this piece, I explore how The…

Issue 136, October 2016

South African Papers   Why read Ivan Vladislavic? The papers gathered together in this special section of Thesis Eleven offer some clues to the curious, or to those watching the detectives. Vladislavic is one of the premier writers in and of South Africa, which is to say something, as this is a rich and vibrant…

Issue 135, August 2016

Mapping Western Australia. The Perth experience, and that of Western Australia, has differences that need to be recognized for what they are, rather than airbrushed over in the cause of generating a unified historical narrative that privileges the south-east corner of the continent and the reinforcement of Australia as a unified nation-state.

Virtual Special Issue: Agnes Heller in Thesis Eleven

This issue of Thesis Eleven presents Agnes Heller’s essays. It is the first in a series of virtual special issues focusing on authors who have made significant contributions to Thesis Eleven.

Issue 134, June 2016

Democracy and Recognition   This issue aims to bridge some of the theoretical gaps by discussing the interconnections between recognition and democracy. This is done by, firstly, highlighting the fact that the relationship of these two concepts is not without its problems – there certainly is potential for pathological developments and deviations – and, secondly,…

Issue 133, April 2016

Politics of Critique and the Critique of Politics Articles: Habermas on the European crisis: Attempting the impossible Volker M. Heins Abstract: Based on a critical reading of Jürgen Habermas’s journalistic writings on the European Union, the article argues that Europe’s current crisis is also a crisis of its narratives, and hence a crisis of meaning. The…

Issue 132, February 2016

Cultural Trauma, Morality and Nihilism Articles: Culture trauma, morality and solidarity: The social construction of ‘Holocaust’ and other mass murders Jeffrey C Alexander Abstract: Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their…

Issue 131, December 2015

Critical Theory and Science Fiction We have attempted in this special edition to include voices that recognize the power of SF [science fiction] to threaten the established order of things and open up critical spaces for audiences to make new sense of everyday life and the ideological flows that operate there. But we also include…

Issue 130, October 2015

Noosphere Rising: Disordering Modernities   Articles: Noosphere rising: Internet-based collective intelligence, creative labour, and social production Michael A Peters and James Reveley Abstract: Our article relocates the debate about creative labour to the terrain of peer-to-peer interneting as the paradigmatic form of nonmarket – social – production. From Yann Moulier Boutang we take the point that…

Issue 129, August 2015

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 70th anniversary of the bombings This special issue of Thesis Eleven has been published to mark the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The concern is to think about what the bombings mean today and how their challenge can be confronted across social and cultural thought and action. The…