Despite strong criticism, functional reasoning is still present in social theory and research. However, references often remain hidden. As a consequence, potentials cannot unfold, nor shortcomings be reflected. Starting from this consideration, our special issue aims to reconsider the potentials and shortcomings of functional lines of thinking in current sociology.
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
Scholarly and popular attention to the concept of care has re-entered the zeitgeist. While the concept has a longstanding history, some recent developments have given greater urgency to employment of the term.
Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption (Polity Press, 2024)
Reviewed by John Lechte
by Rex Butler and A.D.S. Donaldson
UnAustralian art is the art of our present, those missing years since 1970 in McLean’s book. But the real point – to say this for the last time and to conclude – is that we have always been like this. This history has been written for a long time, just not in the name of “Australia”. Those stories we tell of immigrants and expatriates from the past read as though they could have happened yesterday, and we can identify with them as if they were ours. We are all first of all non-national, non-Australian, So many of us, nearly all of us, are immigrants.
5:30pm, December 5, Melbourne
Who is afraid of decoloniality? Knowledge, Language and Culture as India’s new battlegrounds.
Professor Ira Raja (University of Delhi) joins us to discuss the risks of romanticising indigenous cultures while ignoring the internal hierarchies within colonized societies.
by Brendon O’Connor
The challenge ahead for the Democrats is the question of how the best aspects of the Harris campaign, with its multiracial openness and pro-women’s rights agenda, can be incorporated into a more Left-wing Democratic Party. The crushing defeat for Harris is an opportunity for the Democrats to develop policies that offer real solutions to America’s many social and economic problems.
The Oxford World History of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2021)
Reviewed by Krishan Kumar
Contributors: Domonkos Sik, Mathew Abbott, Nikos Nikoletos, Fabian Cabaluz, Tomás Torres López, Harry Blatterer, Panu Minkkinen, Peter Beilharz and Frédéric Vandenberghe
by Rjurik Davidson
The King is dead, long live the King!” This ancient French phrase, dating to at least the Fifteenth Century, is the kind that might have set Fredric Jameson on one of his extended, languorous, alternately dense and playful, intellectually demanding examinations. Marxism’s preeminent cultural critic for more than fifty years, Jameson was the foremost proponent of dialectical thought, in which two seemingly contradictory phenomena were shown to be united by some underlying logic.
thesis eleven 