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

Call for papers: Functional lines of thinking

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.