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Fear has long served elites. They rely on fear to keep and expand their privileges and control the masses. In the current crisis of the capitalist world system, elites in the United States, along with other central countries, promote fear of crime and terrorism. They shaped these fears so that people looked to authorities for security, which permitted extension of apparatuses of coercion like police and military forces. In the face of growing oppression, rebellion against elite hegemony remains possible. This book offers an analysis of the crisis and strategies for rebellion.

The philosopher Michel Foucault's theoretical work provides fertile ground for an analysis of areas of significant concern in researching of social work through his development of the ideas of discourse, power/knowledge, surveillance and governmentality. His development of these concepts allows an insight into the function of policy not always apparent in mainstream and contemporary social policy analysis which has been based on the sociological triumvirate of social class, gender and 'race'. In this article, we can explore how and why these conceptual gifts from Foucault are pertinent to understanding how service users are constructed as objects of social work, particularly with respect to contemporary discourses of social welfare and social exclusion. The paper argues that the use of these ideas challenges some of the less obvious assumptions permeating current developments in social policy and social work provision, whilst also enabling an ability to respond more contextually to shifting frameworks of power and knowledge. There is an acknowledgement of power and its potential positive impact on subjective sense of self and social work has a part to play in this. At the same time, the paper concludes with a warning of 'risk' and professional surveillance and its restriction in facilitating empowerment of vulnerable groups.

This text brings together 14 interventions by social scientists from different countries in Latin America. It is an exercise of collective reflection in which each author exposes in a condensed way the centrality of his vision on social theory and on the challenges that this entails for the development of social sciences in the contemporary Latin American context. The purpuse of the exercise is to show a general view of the development of social theory in the region, as well as to try to recover dynamics of collective recognition and production as forms of proactive resistance to the dominant fragmentation processes in the current academy. An impression shared by the authors is that the result of this dialogue experience makes evident the vitality and variety of sociological production in the region, as well as the need to advance in the construction of a common research agenda. ; Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana publica bajo licencia Creative Commons Atribución-No Comercial-Compartir Igual 4.0 Internacional (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Más información en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

Critical Social Theory (CST) in its broadest sense is a transdisciplinary approach to the social sciences that applies critique to the status quo in order to emancipate humans and the planet from the negative consequences of modernity. A broad understanding of CST includes historical materialism, Frankfurt School theory, cultural theory, poststructural theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory. For example, Craig Calhoun's seminal 1995 study of CST included engagements with Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas' Frankfurt School; Derrida and Foucault's postmodernism; Bourdieu's habitus, field, and capital; Haraway and Fraser's feminist theory; and hooks and Spivak's politics of identity and recognition. The transdisciplinary approach of CST demands the reorganisation of disciplinary practices in order to transgress and transcend pre-existing frames of knowledge organisation found in the social sciences and humanities, in particular history, sociology, economics, ecology, and politics. In this context CST is an 'interpenetrating body of work which demands and produces critique … [that] depends on some manner of historical understanding and analysis'. This historically-grounded critique is essential because 'theory is always for someone and for some purpose' since 'theory constitutes as well as explains the questions it asks (and those it does not ask)'. Scholarship and activism within CST is concerned with understanding how 'tradition', the 'status quo', and the 'mainstream' are self-perpetuating practices of modernity that have significantly negative consequences for humans, society, and the planet as a whole. As Max Horkheimer put it in 1937, these conditions necessitate a 'critical theory of society as it is, a theory dominated at every turn by a concern for reasonable conditions of life'. As discussed, CST is different to the other critical theoretical approaches in setting out a holistic, ecological, and progressive approach to the planetary politics that characterise the 21st century.

From text: The new series of Acta Academica, launched earlier this year, is positioned to generate critical views on society, culture and politics. Acta seeks to attract a more globally representative public and authors and become a site of debate and contestation for humanities research by crossing disciplinary boundaries.1 Critical social theories, as intermediaries for traversing these boundaries, frontiers and limits, organise a variety of interpretive schemes, which conjoins with social reality and the demands of disclosing critiques. Thus, the fresh brief of Acta, as it continuously crafts a new intellectual identity, alludes to an assortment of social and other challenges that are structurally anchored within the polity. Poverty, unemployment, globalised racism, social exclusionand unequal power relations in all spheres and levels of society, are at the core of what the humanities and social sciences should regard as the mainstay of their intellectual and practical endeavours.

This speculative article endeavours to highlight the polemics and disputations of knowledge transformation, while simultaneously demonstrating the productive possibilities of such disputations via three examples of refractions. The latter are generated within the crises and critiques of the discourses within which Social Theory, Human Rights and Philosophy are located. They are further cultivated and sharpened by the interplays between these discourses, suggesting the possibility of self-transforming knowledge constellations. The article concludes that the political import of refractions allows the prospects of just social practices to come sharper into view.

The sustainability of societies is an issue of utmost importance for humankind. This is reflected in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which highlight the main challenges that citizens face, including underserved groups, and set the path for finding solutions to overcome them. The achievement of the SDGs for 2030 is setting not only the political agenda, but also the scientific one. From the field of social sciences, an issue that remains underexplored is the contributions (or lack thereof, in some occasions) from social theory to the consolidation of more sustainable societies, including the underserved groups. In this vein, the aim of this article is to provide robust evidence on how social theory has contributed to such improvement and is still doing it. To this end, it provides an analysis of how the advancements made from social theory with social impact have contributed to the achievement of the SDGs. Alongside, this article also presents how some theories that never had social impact at their core have hindered the improvement of societies. This dual approach provides a clear picture of the role that social theory can play in the achievement of the SDGs, as well as evidence towards the overcoming of exclusionary theories with no scientific basis.

One of the leading debates in social sciences concerns research design. However, in comparative politics, the predominant way conducting research misses out crucial aspects that are central to social theory. This article shows how method and empirical research are highly dependent on the definition of theory. Arguing that theory should not only give an explanation of the social phenomena in question but should also show how this relationship is constructed, this article outlines the consequence of such a perspective, namely that the collection of data should reflect both macro and micro perspectives and the analyses of data should be carried out using mixed methods. In conclusion, such an integrated framework is the most appropriate way to give valuable theoretical feedback, either by examination and revision of already established theories or by a contribution to the construction of new theory in the social sciences. It is important, though, that such a framework is applied in a systematized way.

Social Theory after the Internet' puts forward a theory of how the internet has transformed politics and culture. It examines four countries – the United States, Sweden, India and China – providing a comparative-historical analysis of the uses of information and communication technologies. Written in an accessible, jargon-free language, the book offers a theoretical account from a multidisciplinary perspective on digital media and supports its arguments using the most topical and up-to-date examples.

This paper critically interrogates the usefulness of the concept of violence regimes for social politics, social analysis, and social theory. In the frst case, violence regimes address and inform politics and policy, that is, social politics, both around various forms of violence, such as gender-based violence, violence against women, anti-lesbian, gay and transgender violence, intimate partner violence, and more widely in terms of social and related policies and practices on violence and anti-violence. In the second case, violence regimes assist social analysis of the interconnections of diferent forms and aspects of violence, and relative autonomy from welfare regimes and gender regimes. Third, the violence regime concept engages a wider range of issues in social theory, including the exclusion of the knowledges of the violated, most obviously, but not only, when the voices and experiences of those killed are unheard. The concept directs attention to assumptions made in social theory as incorporating or neglecting violence. More specifcally, it highlights the signifcance of: social efects beyond agency; autotelic ontology, that is, violence as a means and end in itself, and an inequality in itself; the relations of violence, sociality and social relations; violence and power, and the contested boundary between them; and materiality-discursivity in violence and what is to count as violence. These are key issues for both violence studies and social theory more generally.

In this piece I explore how Bhambra and Holmwood's Colonialism and Modern Social Theory implies three different questions that can be asked concerning the connections between colonialism and social theory. With reference to their discussion of Durkheim, I suggest the answers they offer to these possible questions return us to what Kurasawa termed the 'constitutive paradox' of Durkheim's relation to colonialism, namely a mix of political acceptance while also questioning its ideological legitimacy. While exploring Durkheim's comments on colonialism, race, the state and his own Jewishness, I emphasise the need for a careful historical sociology which reckons with the different possible connections between social theory and colonialism.

Abstract: Emotions, Power, and Dissent in Spinoza's Social TheoryFar from his 'rationalist' image, Spinoza recognizes that we do not emerge from the ground as fully formed rational agents. We are born and develop in social worlds, where our affects, values and conceptions of the world are formed. For Spinoza, even the 'free' individual or sage is affected by the social and emotional worlds in which he argues they ought to live. Yet, Spinoza is ambivalent about the social emotions. These socially conditioned affects and values may be harmful to the individual and to the community. Although they are harmful, these affects may exert a kind of physical force -- an affective force -- that binds individuals to them even when they recognize their harm. If these values and affects are what unify the community, then questioning them may be perilous. Spinoza's social theory brings light to the question of the 'dissenter' in the form of the sage. If the sage seeks 'reason', and the norms of the community may be harmful or 'against reason', then the sage is in a precarious position. What happens when one can no longer follow the norm of one's community? What can one do if one recognizes that the norms of one's community might be bad for one or for all? This question interested Spinoza philosophically and personally. Spinoza advocates reforming harmful and irrational community norms; however, he recognizes the difficulty and danger of reform both for the community and for the reformer.

Social theory and photographic aesthetics both engage with issues of representation, realism and validity, having crossed paths in theoretical and methodological controversies. This discussion begins with reflections on the realism debate in photography, arguing that beyond the polar positions of realism and constructivism the photographic image is essentially ambivalent, reflecting the ways in which it is situated within cultural modernity. The discussion draws critically on Simmel's sociology of the visual to elucidate these issues and compares his concept of social forms and their development with the emergence of the photograph. Several dimensions of ambivalence are elaborated with reference to the politics and aesthetics of socially engaged photography in the first half of the twentieth century. It presents a case of the autonomy of the photographic as a social form that nonetheless has the potential to point beyond reality to immanent possibilities. The discussion exemplifies the processes of aesthetic formation with reference to the 'New Vision' artwork of László Moholy-Nagy and the social realism of Edith Tudor Hart.

Abstract: Two groups of factors have contributed to the formation of Iranian associations and academic individuals' status as peripheral in the international social science academic arena. First group consists of external factors such as prevailing euro centrism, English language hegemony and inevitable political-economic problems. Second group of factors are internal factors. Iranian academics' and academic organizations' attitudes towards researchers' choices of their research topics, preferred methodologies and applied theories, has resulted in aridity and stagnation of social research in Iran. Excessive emphasis on positivist paradigm, quantitative research, arbitrary interpretation of indigenization of social science and lack of problem oriented research, have led to the contemporary ambiguous status of social sciences in Iran.

Social theory is developing in response to the coronavirus (COVID) crisis. Fundamental questions about social justice in the relationship of individuals to society are raised by Delanty in his review of political philosophy, including Agamben, Foucault and Žižek. However, the focus on the libertarian critique of authoritarianism is not enough. The social democratic critique of neoliberalism lies at the centre of the contesting responses to the COVID crisis. A social democratic perspective on public health, democracy and state action is contrasted with the anti-statists of left and right. This is addressed in debates on the relationship between science and governance, the place of crisis in theories of change and the conceptualisation of alternative forms of social formation. The crisis initiated by the pandemic, cascading through society, from health to economy, to polity and into violence, includes a contestation between social democratic and neoliberal visions of alternative forms of society.