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Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the contrary, the best prospects for the emergence of a broader popular struggle lie in building, sustaining and linking local struggles.

This article explores the possibilities offered by Collins' model of interaction rituals to an understanding of the emotional dynamics of art auctions. It argues that whilst it explains how the art object becomes the focus of attention, and thus the repository of solidarity and emotional energy, it also obliterates some of the institutional aspects of the auction market that can influence such outcomes. It discusses the need to include an examination of the specific practices of auction houses operating in an international market in their capacity to target specific audiences for their sales.

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism.

This essay brings together some lines of thought contained in Maria Markus's 'Lovers and Friends' (2010) and 'Decent Society and/or Civil Society?' (2001), and, on that basis, explores possibilities for thinking about friendship in the context of contemporary social change. I begin by situating current problems concerning the semantics of friendship in their historical trajectory. I then go on to elaborate friendship's 'normative flexibility', that is, its relative immunity to reifying societal pressures. Finally, I reflect upon the connexions between friendship's normative particularities and Markus's elaboration of 'decency'.

That nearly twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost breakdown of a $37.99 University of Connecticut hoodie that appeared in the Hartford Courant a couple of years ago: the workers received a mere 18 cents, while the university received $2.28 in licensing fees. (Mexican factory: profit, 70 cents; overhead, $2.12; material, $5.50—importer [Champion]: overhead, $5.10; profit, $1.75—retailer [UCONN Co-Op]: overhead, $14.49; profit, $4.50). Use of the logo was 80 cents, and the royalty to the National Collegiate Athletic Association was 57 cents. The workers' share could hardly have been lower when the movement began.

Autopoietic societies have produced three major images of civilization: the Greco-Roman, the Eurocentric Western, and the Settler Society type. The most important incarnation of the latter to date has been America. This article explores the deep-going differences between American and European ideas of civilization. It examines how the American kind of autopoietic civilization expresses itself in preternaturally distinctive conceptualizations of nature and freedom, life and death, order and chaos, city and ecumene. The article discusses the political and social implications of this.

Much has been made of the 'Southern difference' in cultural and sociological images of the North American landscape. Everything isdifferent there: the cuisine, the music, the religion, and the politics. Moreover, the South was the crucible in which two of the definitive North American experiences were formed: the Civil War (1861–5) and the Civil Rights Movement a century later. This article poses another important category, in addition to 'race and space' – namely, the concept of tragedy, and the correlative rendering of the South as 'America's tragic landscape'.

Tracing the relationship between Marxism and Darwinism in Bernard Smith's writing, the article unpacks the meaning of Smith's claim that 'it is the business of the art historian to reveal tendencies'. While Smith tended towards Marxism his writing is not about Marxist tendencies in art. Smith was practising a type of genealogy rather than teleology, something, that is, more Darwinian than metaphysical, philosophical or ideological. I argue that Smith's claim is more than methodological: it also shaped the content of his historiography and particularly his interpretation of Australian art.

Despite Castoriadis's animosity towards the idea that his work has anything to do with hermeneutics, it does. In this article I endeavor to expose the hermeneutical dimension inherent to Castoriadis's work and to explore some of the hermeneutical problems which his work opens up. This leads me into discussions of such matters as the relationship between the stratification of Being and its exploration, the nature of ensemblization and the ensidic dimension of Being, and the nature and significance of determination in the human and particularly the social-historical realm.

This article deploys a double conceptual framework. One frame is positioned through the ideas of absolute strangers & outsiders. The other frame develops out of, though is distinct from, the first, & refers to the disaggregated forms of modern citizenship. The citizen-as-absolute-stranger in addition to accruing political rights may also accrue social, economic or identity rights, or traverse wider relations between him or herself & other absolute strangers in either national or international settings. It is in this context that outsiders are configured -- aliens who have no national-juridical status. 41 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd, copyright 2004.]

Simmel develops his concept of the stranger in an overly structural & reductionist manner. Contrary to Simmel's suggestion, there is an indeterminate relation between structural exclusion & the attribution of strangeness. After showing that 'the stranger' must be rethought in a cultural-sociological way, this essay demonstrates an alternative approach. Articulating a 'discourse' that structures Western projections of strangeness, I explore its relation to colonialism, racial & class domination, & national conflict in modern Western history. This approach suggests an alternative, not only to Simmel but to Merton's & Coser's earlier structural-functional reconceptualization of stranger theory. 26 References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd, copyright 2004.]

Traversing cultural studies and political theory, this paper asks how any representative is to represent a diverse constituency, given that any constituency is necessarily co-instituted—that is, made up of—multiple and conflicting bodies and interests. Arguing that the term has suffered from a deficit of enquiry within the theoretical and critical humanities, this article thus aims to re-figure the concept of constituency. The specific understanding of constituency formation within the context of British political system, something especially visible in the wake of the EU referendum and its aftermath, highlights that constituencies are understood within this context through an atomic logic—that is, that each constituency is made up of individual constituents. Thinking with the notion of constituent power allows for a better understanding of the co-instituted nature of constituencies: how and by whom they are co-created. This, in turn, undermines any understanding of political representation as a merely bi-directional practice between representative and constituency. Finally, a close reading of Ghislaine Leung's CONSTITUTION helps probe further both a bi-directional account of constituency formation and the notion that constituencies are themselves atomically structured, upsetting set theory in the process and allowing us to better apprehend the co-constitutive relationship between constituency and constituent.

This handbook was initiated under the coordination and support action "User Engagement for Large Scale Pilots in the Internet of Things" (U4IoT) that provides online and offline toolkits, workshops and other forms of support to actively engage end-users in the Internet of Things (IoT) Large Scale Pilot (LSP) projects of European IoT-LSP programme. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation under grant agreement No 732078. The handbook describes the Co-Creative Workshop Methodology that is especially produced by Stembert Design for the Internet of Things (IoT) Large Scale Pilot (LSP) projects in the European IoT-LSP programme. The goal of the methodology is to bring together LSP partners, stakeholders and end-users to co-create solutions in a couple of hours. The Co-Creative Workshop Toolkit enables experts to empathise with the needs of end-users, whilst end-users are enabled to communicate on an expert level. Ideally this increases empathy within design and development teams, leading to more meaningful IoT-solutions. Four co-creative phases: Co-analysis, Co-design, Co-evaluation and Co-implementation are explained in this handbook together with practical information on how to organise, facilitate, analyse and document a Co-Creative Workshop. U4IoT supports the LSP projects to implement the Co-Creative Workshop Methodology into their projects and provides LSP partners with support to organise and facilitate Co-Creative Workshops.