You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Twenty-first-century Western culture is characterized by profound transformations in its forms of collective organization. While traditional institutions of Western liberal democracies still wield significant political power, new forms of collective agency - most visible in progressive social protest movements, but also in the global rise of populism - have increasingly put pressure on established systems of collective organization. The contributors to this volume explore the social, political, and aesthetic forms that collective agency takes in the twenty-first century across a variety of media, including social platforms such as TikTok, multiplayer video games, and contemporary lyric poetry.
This book enquires from a sociological perspective into contemporary corporeal transformations brought about by exoskeletal devices. Challenging material boundaries of human bodies, their capacities, (in)abilities and skills, exoskeletal devices question social norms of corporeal “deviance” and “extension.” Through multi-sited ethnography, interviews and analyses of contemporary science and technology studies (STS), sociological literature and current approaches from the phenomenology of the body, this book shows how exoskeletons contribute to forging three contemporary “corporeal worlds”: impairment, ability and above-average ability. The text questions deeply held ideas about enhancement and augmentation, corporeal deviance and “normality,” in the three studied fields of rehabilitation, industry and the armed forces. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students across the social sciences and humanities, including from sociology, philosophy, body studies, and science and technology studies.
Society in Flux: Two Centuries of Social Theory traces how modern tensions and modes of analyzing them have changed over the course of the last 200 years or so, through three modes of theorizing: critical theory, classical theory, and systems theory.
The present volume contains thirteen articles based on work presented at the “XX. Century Conference: If This Is A Woman” at Comenius University Bratislava in January 2019. The conference was organized against anti-gender narratives and related attacks on academic freedom and women’s rights currently all too prevalent in East-Central Europe. The papers presented at the conference and in this volume focus, to a significant extent, on this region. They touch upon numerous points concerning gendered experiences of World War II and the Holocaust. By purposely emphasizing the female experience in the title, we encourage to fill the lacunae that still, four decades after the enrichment of Holocaust studies with a gendered lens, exist when it comes to female experiences.
Stability is at the core of every discussion of order, organization or institutionalization. From an »inside« perspective, the stability of each order-constituting element is assumed. In contrast, in critical discourses instability (e.g. through ambiguity or non-control) is located at the outside of the social order as its negative. By treating this argumentative symmetrical structure as »idioms of stability and destabilization«, the articles try to rethink order: How can we describe structures from a perspective in which instability, non-control and irrationality are not contrary to ordering systems, but contribute to their stability? How might the notions of identity, knowledge and institutions in social and cultural studies be contested by this change of perspective?
"From anti-Reagan riots in West Berlin to pictures of revolutionary Nicaragua, it is often impossible to grasp social protest movements of the 1980s without referring to how they imagined "the Americas". This edited volume is aimed at historicizing the representations of the United States and of Latin America among Western European protesters around that decade. By researching dominant interpretation patterns, practices and symbols within these movements, this book offers a fresh and compelling look at protest in the second half of the 20th century."--Page 4 of cover.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda and coinciding with the intensification of violent attacks on the civilian population in the East Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo scholars and students from Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenia, Cameroon, South Africa, Germany, Austria, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Switzerland joined together in Rwanda to discuss the topic "Overcoming violence". This volume is a documentation of the lectures of this conference, organised by the Protestant Institute of Arts and Social Sciences (PIASS) in Butare, the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda (EPR) and the Faculty of Protestant Theology of the Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB). Pascal Bataringaya, President of the Presbyterian Church in Rwanda. Penine Umimbabazi, Assistant professor of Policy analysis and conflict transformation at the Protestant Institute of Arts and Social Sciences (PIASS) in Huye/Rwanda. Claudia Jahnel and Traugott Jähnichen, Professors at the Faculty of Protestant Theoloy of the Ruhr-University Bochum.
In the early 19th century, a new social collective emerged out of impoverished artisans, urban rabble, wandering rural lower classes, bankrupt aristocrats and precarious intellectuals, one that would soon be called the proletariat. But this did not yet exist as a unified, homogeneous class with affiliated political parties. The motley appearance, the dreams and longings of these figures, torn from all economic certainties, found new forms of narration in romantic novellas, reportages, social-statistical studies, and monthly bulletins. But soon enough, these disorderly, violent, nostalgic, errant, and utopian figures were denigrated as reactionary and anarchic by the heads of the labour movement, since they did not fit into their grand linear vision of progress. In this book, Patrick Eiden-Offe tells their story, tracing the making of the proletariat in Vörmarz Germany (1815–1848) through the writings of figures like Ludwig Tieck, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Engels, Louise Otto-Peters, Ernst Willkomm, and Georg Büchner, and in so doing, revealing a striking similarity to the disorderly classes of today.
Although sociology is present as a discipline or as a social practice in most countries in the world, its future as a not-only Western social science has hardly been addressed before. In this book, a team of interdisciplinary scholars have been working together not so much to offer one single response to the question than to raise important issues at stake for the future of sociology. Is it universal? Can it be indigenous? How is it possible – and is it even desirable – to write its history differently so as to know better about its early world diffusion and gradual Westernization? Do we need to expand or change its canon? This collection brings together essays that are all engaged in in...
This book explores how British culture is negotiating heroes and heroisms in the twenty-first century. It posits a nexus between the heroic and the state of the nation and explores this idea through British television drama. Drawing on case studies including programmes such as The Last Kingdom, Spooks, Luther and Merlin, the book explores the aesthetic strategies of heroisation in television drama and contextualises the programmes within British public discourses at the time of their production, original broadcasting and first reception. British television drama is a cultural forum in which contemporary Britain’s problems, wishes and cultural values are revealed and debated. By revealing t...