Suchergebnisse

This article unpacks some complexities of 'decolonising' in Ireland, a complicated semiperipheral 'mixed colony', in which rhetorics, logic, and grammar are simultaneously colonial and decolonial, interrupting and complicitly reproducing divisive and dehumanising colonialities of knowledge and being. The global call to decolonise academia invites Irish social scientists to confront significant social divisions, economic precarities, and epistemic erasures. I present 'decolonial repair' as a doubled figure of return and mending, engaging the decolonial work of double translation: centring anti-colonial thought and enacting horizontal dialogue. Facing partly obscured colonial wounds that remain difficult to countenance, a doubled repair re-approaches transformation via renewed engagements between non-Occidental demands for decolonisation and ambiguous legacies of extraversion. Unpacking elisions, complicities, and precarities of Irish social science, this article teases out what 'decolonising social science' might entail in a semiperipheral, white(ly) post-colony. In keeping with the scope of this journal and the defining role of sociology in the social sciences, this article focusses on sociology as a lens for discussing the broader, constitutive elisions, turns, and complicities of Irish social science. The broader aim and hope is to help unpack some of the challenges, projects, and pitfalls involved in this Special Issue's focus on 'decolonising academia'.

This review essay discusses decolonial and revisionist approaches to the sociological canon, centring on a major new work, Colonialism and Modern Social Theory by Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood (2021). The challenge to 'classical' social theory and the demand to reconstitute the theory curriculum come in the context of increased visibility for wider decolonial agendas, linked to 'fallist' protests in South Africa, Black Lives Matter and allied antiracist organizing, and calls to decolonize public and civic spaces and institutions such as universities, effect museum restitution, and colonial reparations. The review identifies continuities and complementarities with Connell's critique of the sociological canon, though Colonialism and Modern Social Theory takes a different tack from Connell's Southern Theory (2009). Bhambra and Holmwood's opening of sociology's canon converges with Connell's recent work to align a critical project of global and decolonial public sociology with a pragmatic programme for doing academic work differently.

This chapter explores new questions for human rights in a context of extreme poverty and inequalities of income, wealth, political power and biological life. Minimalist and contradictory narratives of poverty and inequality fail human rights by failing to offer coherent bases for vindicating basic minimum rights and realizing social justice. Minimalist, over-optimistic framings of poverty predominate, denying substantive rights universalism and masking inequality s power effects. Poverty is important, since gross deprivations devastate the basic floor of rights universalism. Large and widening economic inequalities undermine solidarity and general duties to systematically uphold and substantiate human rights universality. Since post-human threats reflect widening inequality, human rights duties ought to include constraining extreme wealth. Wealth concentration and its main mechanism, financialization, pose major threats to human rights and humanity in general. This chapter discusses three posthuman threats: algocracy, pharmocracy and chemocracy, which are underwritten by interests and instrumentalities of wealth itself, threatening each generation of human rights with disequalizing, exploitative and dehumanizing outcomes. Political agency has been manipulated and distorted, and human bodies and biological life have been exploited, injured, poisoned and killed. Focusing on poverty eradication alone does too little to protect human rights, let alone advance them. To protect both humanity and rights, human rights must resist the appropriation of the logic of rights by nonhuman entities and address the considerable political, human and ecological harms already inflicted ; Peer reviewed ; 2022-03-31

This article reflects on Collins's classic work, The Credential Society (1979), situating his critique of educational credentialism within broader 'conflict sociology'. The discussion reappraises Collins's work in the context of the 'new credentialism', 'new learning' and the race, gender and class concerns raised in current debates on higher education. The article characterizes contemporary higher education as being trapped in a Procrustean dynamic: techno-utopianism with job displacement and expansionism with declining public support. Collins attempts to escape the legacy of structural-functionalism through conflict sociology or predictions of systemic crisis. This is contrasted with his contemporary, Herbert Gintis's eclectic attempt to construct a transdisciplinary social science. The key problem of marketized inequality is linked to the sociology of absences in conflict sociology, and it is argued that inequalities of class, race, gender and coloniality in higher education and credentialism can no longer be ignored.

This essay discusses two important recent books on health justice and makes the case for their relevance to global health and to social and political mobilization for health reform. Health and Social Justice (Ruger, 2010) and Health Justice (Venkatapuram, 2011) approach theories of capabilities and justice as the substantive ground of human health. They substantiate and more fully specify the capabilities paradigm, its shared basis with health rights and its relevance to health reforms and the growing global health justice movement. The recent turning point for global health invites a meeting point with the capabilities paradigm. The capabilities approach offers conceptual and practical potential for 'global health', linking normative, substantive and procedural claims for health justice and health rights.