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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Theory, Knowledge and Science
Ai Fetishism And Perverse Climate Disavowal: Why Denying Destructiveness Facilitates Our Ecological Collapse, Alexander M. Stoner, Alexander M. Stoner, Anthony J. Knowles
Ai Fetishism And Perverse Climate Disavowal: Why Denying Destructiveness Facilitates Our Ecological Collapse, Alexander M. Stoner, Alexander M. Stoner, Anthony J. Knowles
Journal Articles
As ecological crises intensify, scholars and activists increasingly question the sustainability of economic growth. Yet, the dominant growth-oriented paradigm remains foundational to advanced capitalist societies and cannot be altered without significant social disruption. The resulting tension between ecological limits and the imperative for continuous growth generates “climate anxiety.” This article advances the concept of perverse climate disavowal: a mode of climate denial that acknowledges climate threats while maintaining faith in the illusion of infinite economic expansion. This disavowal functions as a psychological defense mechanism, enabling individuals and institutions to avoid confronting structural contradictions. The article examines the increasing use of …
Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, And Criticism In Postwar France, Davide Panagia
Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, And Criticism In Postwar France, Davide Panagia
Politics
Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of “French theory.” Panagia’s book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France’s pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de …
Freedom And Heteronomy In The Anthropocene, Alexander M. Stoner, Harry F. Dahms
Freedom And Heteronomy In The Anthropocene, Alexander M. Stoner, Harry F. Dahms
Journal Articles
No abstract provided.
Scrutinizing Precarity: In Search Of Emancipatory Potential, Jaime Aznar Erasun
Scrutinizing Precarity: In Search Of Emancipatory Potential, Jaime Aznar Erasun
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis
This paper provides a review and discussion on the emancipatory potential of the notion of ‘precarity’. Since the 1980s, the notion of ‘precarity’ has been used increasingly by scholars and activists to account for variegated grievances. Specifically, it has been used to address issues related to the transformations of labour in the XXIst century: neoliberal reorganization of labour markets, increasing unavailability of stable jobs, increased personal debts, debilitating labour unions or the lack of accessible housing among other issues. However, beyond structural grievances voiced by everyday workers, precarity can also serve as an analytical tool to pin down socially induced …
Time And Power: The Will To Temporalize In Digital Culture, Talha Issevenler
Time And Power: The Will To Temporalize In Digital Culture, Talha Issevenler
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation, I analyze the new forms of temporalization of social media in relationship to arrangements of power through nonhuman agency of the algorithm. The new social media industry refers to the entities that make up its circulatory movement, simply as ‘content’. This suggests that scientific or empirical study of social media should deal with content and analyze this as the data of research through sampling (Manovich, 2020, p. 93-94). Yet the forms and the temporality in which the content is presented not only are open to empirical research but should be central to our understanding of the organization …
Marx, Critical Theory, And The Treadmill Of Production Of Value: Why Environmental Sociology Needs A Critique Of Capital, Alex Stoner
Journal Articles
This chapter explores the domestication of Marx’s critique of political economy within Marxist-oriented environmental sociology, and treadmill of production (ToP) theory, in particular. The aim is to explicate the theoretical resources for a rigorous critique of capital-induced planetary degradation. Shortcomings of ToP theory pertaining to the conceptualization of capital and value are identified. The reasons for these shortcomings, including how they might be addressed, are elaborated by reconsidering key aspects of Marx’s critical theory of modern capitalist society. The chapter contributes to current discussions in both critical theory and environmental sociology by demonstrating the continued relevance of Marx’s critical theory …
Things Are Getting Worse On Our Way To Catastrophe: Neoliberal Environmentalism, Repressive Desublimation, And The Autonomous Ecoconsumer, Alex Stoner
Journal Articles
The aim of neoliberal environmentalism was to unleash the market to protect the environment; but as it turns out, things are getting worse on our way to catastrophe. Despite persistent failures, neoliberal environmentalism remains prevalent—and apparently without alternative. This paper directs focus on an often-overlooked dimension of this apparent stasis: the nexus of self and society in advanced capitalism, as shown in the linkage between neoliberal environmentalism and the autonomous ecoconsumer. Marcuse’s concept of repressive desublimation is engaged to better understand how environmentalist desire is currently being thwarted in ways that inhibit movement toward socioecological emancipation. The paper provides an …
Constructing Commonmentalities: Toward Collaborative Governance, Knowledge And Subjectivity, Imil Ferrara
Constructing Commonmentalities: Toward Collaborative Governance, Knowledge And Subjectivity, Imil Ferrara
Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects
Western society’s intractable social and environmental problems arise outside the bounds of classical liberal ideation, challenging the utilitarian rationality, decision-making faculty, and popular legitimacy of our liberal institutions. Through a qualitative analysis of three collaborative, community-based institutions, this study aims to identify and illuminate alternative conceptions and organizational relationships, which transcend liberal shortcomings and succeed precisely where liberal institutions have failed. It draws on Michel Foucault’s account of liberal governance, discourse and subject formation, but employs a complex-systems lens to move from critical deconstruction to intentional normative construction, from radical subjectivism to a collaborative pragmatic realism, and from the critique …
Can The Lifeworld Save Us From Neoliberal Governmentality? Social Work, Critical Theory, And Habermas, Stephanie A. Bryson
Can The Lifeworld Save Us From Neoliberal Governmentality? Social Work, Critical Theory, And Habermas, Stephanie A. Bryson
The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
Two years have passed since the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump, and U.S. social work is revisiting its radical stirrings and grappling with its conservative moorings. In this paper, I will argue that as U.S. social work appraises the adequacy of its intellectual leaders, the cultural relevance of its practice models, and its stance toward the Enlightenment ideals of reason, truth, and justice, it might usefully re-examine its relationship to the critical theory legacy of the Frankfurt School, especially the thinking of Jürgen Habermas. My goal is in this essay is to suggest ways in which Habermasian thinking could …
Georg Lukács (1885-1971) And The Critique Of Reification: On The Dialectical Genesis Of The Great Acceleration, Alexander M. Stoner, Andony Melathopoulos
Georg Lukács (1885-1971) And The Critique Of Reification: On The Dialectical Genesis Of The Great Acceleration, Alexander M. Stoner, Andony Melathopoulos
Book Sections/Chapters
This chapter situates Lukács' critique of reification (1923) in relation to the emergence of the Great Acceleration. We develop Lukács' critique through the issue of the increasing rationalization of industrial and administrative work in the early twentieth century. In do so, we show how Lukács is able to relocate the continued relevance of Marx's insights with respect to the deeper structure of capitalist society in his consideration of the differential manner in which proletariat and bourgeois class consciousness approach the problem of social contradictions. We then discuss how, for Lukács, the overcoming of reification (or the failure to do so) …
Critique And Transformation: On The Hypothetical Nature Of Ecosystem Service Value And Its Neo-Marxist, Liberal And Pragmatist Criticisms, Andony P. Melathopoulos, Alex Stoner
Critique And Transformation: On The Hypothetical Nature Of Ecosystem Service Value And Its Neo-Marxist, Liberal And Pragmatist Criticisms, Andony P. Melathopoulos, Alex Stoner
Journal Articles
Ecosystem service valuation (ESV) attempts to transform the opposition of human economic necessity and ecological conservation by valuing the latter in terms of the services rendered by the former. However, despite a number of ESV-inspired sustainability initiatives since the 1990s, global ecological degradation continues to accelerate. This suggests that ESV has fallen far short of its goals of sustainable social transformation—a failure which has generated considerable criticism. This paper reviews three prominent lines of ESV criticism: 1) the neo-Marxist criticism, which emphasizes the “fictitious” character of ecosystem commodities; 2) the liberal criticism through Friedrich Hayek's concept “scientistic objectivism”; and 3) …
Sociobiophysicality And The Necessity Of Critical Theory: Moving Beyond Prevailing Conceptions Of Environmental Sociology In The Usa, Alex Stoner
Journal Articles
Today, to perceive the link between society and environment does not require that we engage in an effort of great abstraction. What remains paradoxical is that the intensity and scale of societally induced environmental degradation, which rose to historically unprecedented levels during the latter half of the 20th century, is synchronous with an equally impressive increase in public concern for and attention to the biophysical world. This article examines values-based and traditional Marxist-oriented approaches to environmental sociology in the USA in order to assess whether or not – and if so, how exactly – these approaches help us make sense …
Book Review: Bogen On Social Theory, Rules, And Order, James Chriss
Book Review: Bogen On Social Theory, Rules, And Order, James Chriss
Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications
Reviews the book "Order Without Rules: Critical Theory and the Logic of Conversation," by David Bogen.