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This publication is with permission of the rights owner (Sage) freely accessible. This interview addresses Andreas Reckwitz’s main work, A Society of Singularities, but puts it in relation to his earlier and later writings. It starts with the strong and broad reception of this work in Germany. Next, it turns to how his understanding of the transformation of the social logics of modernity is related to other sociological understandings. In this way, the crucial distinctions of his work between the general and the particular, between formal rationalisation and culturalisation, are thematised. The next part addresses Reckwitz’s Foucault-inspired concept of critique and his understanding of the relation between theoretical and empirical work. The interview then goes on to the transformation of class structure, which is understood in terms of a culturalisation of inequality. The interview ends with a section about the kind of sufferings and problems that are typical of the present age, and how they might affect social transformation.

The paper has two complementary objectives. First, it sustains an analysis of the concept of ‘coloniality’ that accounts for the epistemic imbalance in the modern world, demonstrating precisely how Africa is adversely affected, having been caught up in the throes of coloniality and its epistemic implications. Second – and complementarily – the paper attempts to bring this very concept of ‘coloniality’ into the discourse on Africa’s emigration crisis, arguing that Africa’s emigration crisis is traceable, inter alia, to the epistemic imbalance in the very structure of modernity. This imbalance results from the stifling of Africa’s epistemic resources under Western epistemic hegemony. Epistemic coloniality, of course interacting with some material factors, creates a sufficient condition for emigration. It is further theorized that the apparent lack of epistemic will on the part of Africans to mobilize some surviving epistemic resources to address some problems on their own is also a function of coloniality. ispartof: Theory Culture & Society vol:39 issue:6 pages:3-19 status: published

The development enterprise has deepened the maladaptation of a social order built on the values of modernity and coloniality. Postcolonial scholars critiqued the discourses that were perpetuating its failures. Latin American decolonial scholars sharpened the analysis, rejecting Eurocentric frames of thought and drawing on a plurality of voices and ways of knowing. Mounting evidence of global socio-ecological interdependence has led to the emergence of discourses of transition advocating a break with the civilizational model of the modern West. Buen vivir and postextractivism are two Latin American examples of these discourses. Although there are divergences between these and Northern transition discourses, the scale of civilizational transition renders dialogue imperative. A review of the path of Latin American critical thought raises the possibility of North-South synergies, highlighting the implications of a true dialogue of ways of knowing.El proyecto del desarrollo ha profundizado la mala adaptación de un orden social construido sobre los valores de la modernidad y la colonialidad. Los analistas poscoloniales hicieron una crítica de los discursos que perpetuaban dichos fracasos. Los académicos descoloniales latinoamericanos fueron más allá, rechazando marcos de pensamiento eurocéntricos y recurriendo a una pluralidad de voces y formas de saber. La creciente evidencia en torno a la interdependencia socioecológica global ha llevado a la aparición de discursos de transición que abogan por una ruptura con el modelo civilizatorio del Occidente moderno. El buen vivir y el posextractivismo son dos ejemplos latinoamericanos de estos discursos. Aunque hay divergencias entre ellos y los discursos de transición del Norte, la escala de la transición civilizatoria exige el diálogo. Una revisión de la línea de pensamiento crítico latinoamericano plantea la posibilidad de sinergias Norte-Sur, destacando las implicaciones de un verdadero diálogo de saberes.

For Max Weber, modernity is characterized by a tragic conflict among value spheres, each claiming to possess the ‘true meaning’ of human life. In particular, Weber argues that while the political sphere is dominated by the unifying, exclusionary, power-driven, and war-prone nation state, the ethical sphere is characterized by the universalization of individually based, deontological norms. For Weber, I argue, the modern separation between the ethical and political spheres originates in ancient Judaism. His work on Judaism, mostly neglected by political theorists, describes the emergence of politics as an autonomous, naturalistic sphere with the establishment of kingship. Biblical prophets, simultaneously, were the inventors of an idealistic, mulish, universal ethics Weber termed the ‘ethics of ultimate ends’. Thus, against the Greek model harmonizing ethics and politics, Judaism invented an antagonistic model of the two. This Jewish imagination lay dormant for almost two millennia but returned to the stage in secularized modernity.

In this article, the authors explore the popular animation Nezha (2019), examining the idea that it typifies the ‘national style’. Expanding the work of other scholars who have demonstrated the changeability of the ‘national style’, here they examine this notion in regard to the way in which Nezha (2019) represents ‘Chineseness’ at this particular socio-political moment. Methodologically, they focus their analysis largely upon the film’s narrative and aesthetics, drawing on a number of reviews as counterpoints for the way in which it was interpreted to situate it in popular discourses. The authors argue that Nezha (2019) presents a national image in which traditions and modernity are interwoven, and the focus upon the ‘technological’ – its digitality – constitutes a refiguring of animation in China as symbolic of modernity. Narratively and aesthetically mediating between the past and the present, Nezha (2019) embodies a ‘national style’ which is on one hand hybrid in its inter/nationality, but also culturally delimited in terms of which cultural heritages are held up as emblematic of the nation.

Previous research has examined biomedical metaphors in discourses on military intervention, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism. Starting from the observation that such metaphors also occur in the contemporary conflict prevention discourse, this article inquires into their intellectual origins and implications for the understanding of war and prevention. Drawing on archival analysis, it finds that they manifest in two ways in prevention discourse. In the cataclysmic notion, war is likened to an epidemic or plague. This metaphor was popularised by Christian pacifists in the 19th century and carried forth into 20th-century prevention documents. The more recent risk factor notion is couched in terms of enabling conditions for threats to the body politic. By engaging imagery on immunity and public health, it draws parallels between social and political organisation and functions of the body. The article argues that while both notions of biomedical metaphors of war in conflict prevention discourse are firmly rooted in modernist thinking, this intellectual legacy manifests differently. The cataclysmic notion associates war and disease with barbarism and thus paints prevention as a civilisational objective. The risk factor notion, on the contrary, represents war as a technico-scientific problem and thus shifts the focus towards governing and controlling war through knowledge and technology. Furthermore, both notions converge in the idea of a body politic that is to be protected and in the implicit assumption of world order in which war-as-disease is a temporary deviation from the ‘healthy norm’, while peace-as-health is the desired and default state of affairs.

By reconsidering Simmel’s concept of space, this article introduces space into the epistemological field of relational sociology to construct a relational spatiality based on relational sociology, demonstrating the continuity between spatial and relational approaches in the study of modernity. It first explains Simmel’s relational epistemology and the metropolis, and then constructs the relational spatiality vis-a-vis the two main viewpoints of contemporary relational sociology. Space is relational in nature because it is defined by iterative interactions between actors, which go beyond visible geographical cognition to sociologically express the living process people experience in fragmentary forms of social space. Furthermore, this relational spatiality, combined with Michel Foucault’s discourse, reveals the process attribute of space from the perspective of relational sociology, showing the possibility of a spatial epistemology based on relational sociology.

This essay assesses the current state of scholarship on British and American melodrama and introduces the cluster of articles on that topic that follow. It suggests that recent advances in the field have made evident the trans-cultural, trans-medial and reproductive nature of melodrama as an art, re-focusing critical attention on melodrama's performance, production and formal evolution not within but among, and by movement between, the different cultures, media, creators, audiences, forms and works it involved. Drawing attention to British and American melodrama's critical role in this vast, largely unrecovered history of relational, migrational and reiterative creation, and noting the immediate challenges such a history presents to critical understanding and study, the essay describes the manner in which each of the cluster's articles responds to those new challenges and the ways in which, both individually and as a group, they have begun to lend that history more clarity.

The concept of the Anthropocene has reintroduced politics of denial at the centre of critical studies of international relations. This article interrogates Bruno Latour’s explanation of climate change denial with reference to an ontological difference between Modernity and the Anthropocene, together with his advocacy for a new language beyond the Modern gaze. Our aims are twofold: to disclose how Latour’s posthuman critique risk reproducing prevalent forms of climate change denial in the global North, and to question what falls outside Latour’s dualistic frame: the heterogenous ways through which climate change and the Anthropocene is met across the globe; the ambiguous relation with nature through which modernity was formed; the modernist genealogy of Anthropocene discourse, and lastly how discourses of global governance have absorbed posthumanist critique in its attempt to naturalise postcolonial power relations. At stake, we argue, is critical theory’s paradoxical complicity in the denialism it seeks to critique.

M.K. Raghavendra, The Hindu Nation. A Reconciliation with Modernity (New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2021), ix + 310 pp.

A fil rouge goes through Habermas’s decade long research. It is the idea that Reason and rationality permeate human societies and may lead human action towards emancipation, if aptly elaborated through the filter of theoretical reflection. Theory must pick up on this rational core and turn the intrinsic rational potential inherent to modern societies into a self-consciously pursued ‘project of enlightenment’. This introduction to the special issue ‘Habermas, Democracy, and the Public Sphere: Theory and Practice’ shows how Habermas’s work in different scientific domains contributes to the construction of the ‘project of modernity’ from the many angles that such a complex project requires. The public sphere is, in Habermas’s theory, the societal domain in which communicative interactions have a chance to make Reason come to bear on human societies and lead them on the path to social and political emancipation. The contributions to this special issue focus therefore on the public sphere and illustrate the evolution of the concept in Habermas’s work and its relation to democracy at national and supranational level.

This article begins with two central ideas – that feelings of rage appear to be on the increase in present modernity and that one of the main sources of rage is directly linked to consumer culture and the retail experience it fosters. Although retail trade allows twenty-first century individuals to spend their money on material goods and experiences which provide structure and a sense of meaning and belonging, what it also causes is ambivalence, insecurity and anxiety. These are formidable feelings that cause irritation, frustration and anger to gradually fester until it accumulates into something violent that distorts the way an individual thinks, acts and treats other people. With these points in mind, what this article provides is a thorough sociological interpretation of twenty-first century retail rage. Veering away from existing interpretations of rage by drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s analysis and image of a one-dimensional society, what this article explores is the idea that retail experiences turn people into individuals who are bound and controlled by a consumer duty. As I contend, based on my unique position as a researcher turned retail worker, it is this administered, one-dimensional kind of lifestyle that cultivates rage. To support my argument and understand more comprehensively how and why retail breeds frustration and anger, I use a selection of narrative episodes to unpack three key sources of consumer rage in the twenty-first century. These sources have been labelled instantaneity, performativity and unfulfillment.

From the Latin American modernity/coloniality project, we address the inhospitality of the modern/colonial and globally designed world-system in relation to suicidality. In our vernacular Spanglish, guided by epistemological disobedience, and responding to epistemicide, we interpellate ourselves to unmask the hidden colonial structures of power of modernity’s global design on suicide knowledge. Our intent is to argue, specifically from the perspective of coloniality and our racialized, gendered, and monetized bodies, that suicide is rather an extension of modernity’s colonial genocide. From the decolonial geo and body-politics of knowledge, our discussion on modernity’s Eurocentric rhetoric on suicide departs from the materialization of suicidality in our flesh. We story experiences of our bodies with life and pleas of death, within the context of our immigrant backgrounds, and as family therapists in the United States (U.S.). We adopt autopsy as an analogy from where to advance such analysis to contest Eurocentric configurations of suicide from within, but against modernity. We emphasize the hidden racism and capitalism of suicide embedded within the persuasive Eurocentric promises of the Anglo scientific method and the U.S. American Dream. We address the concepts of epistemicide, coloniality of knowledge and of being. It is our hope to contribute to further advance decolonizing possibilities to reinscribe options that would border with the current Western knowledge on suicide. This may require other configurations of the body, knowledge, hence ways of being, doing, thinking, sensing, feeling, imagining, and dreaming to coexist among pluriversal hospitable worlds of life and death.

J.F. Dorahy's The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism (2019) offers contemporary readers a conscientious assessment of the intellectual initiatives of Ágnes Heller, György Márkus, and Ferenc Fehér, both in the years immediately following their apprenticeship with György Lukács, and later, through their independent philosophical endeavours. Dorahy's book also pinpoints the Budapest thinkers' proposal for a radical democratic reckoning, and begins to suggest how that proposal might today bear on global practice and globally-minded theories. The book is an excellent introduction to the ideas of Heller and Márkus. But through them, it is also a striking and thoroughly relevant consideration of the possibilities for an ethics of planetary commitment, and for a critical theory fixed upon incorporating the vigorous rootstock of radical democracy with a multidimensional, pluralistic social order.

Shopping malls in the global South have been expanding rapidly, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, since 2000. Among others, they are seen as part of the processes of globalization, modernization and modernity. Using a mixed-methods approach based on case study of malls in Accra, Ghana, this study argues that malls in the global South, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, project images of modernity on account that they are framed as multiple loci of collective consumption and, as well, tend to represent nodes of global convergence.

My book, published in 2020, reconstructs the history of ʿAṣfūriyyeh, one of the first ‘modern’ mental hospitals in the Middle East. It uses the rise and fall of this institution as a lens through which to examine the development of modern psychiatric theory and practice in the region as well as the socio-political history of modern Lebanon. ʿAṣfūriyyeh becomes a window into social-policy questions relating to dependency and welfare, definitions of deviance, the relation of mission to empire, state-building processes, and the relation of medical authority to religion. The book also examines the impact of war on health and healthcare infrastructures. Reflecting on the afterlife of this and other institutions, the book calls for a new ‘ethics of memory.’

Driven by globalization, modernity and the development of media technology, transnational media consumption is increasingly prevalent. Together with domestic media consumption, transnational media consumption constitutes the fragmentation and diversification of individuals’ media consumption behaviors. Yet research concerning the hybrid media effects generated by domestic and transnational media consumption is still underdeveloped. Using a sample of 556 Chinese Internet users, this study proposes a concept of transnational media consumption dissonance to compare the effects of hybrid media consumption on sexism and gender-role norms in marriage (GRIM). The findings suggest that individuals’ perceptions of gender-role norms are not only affected by domestic media usage but also altered through transnational media usage. We illustrate how transnational media consumption dissonance can affect Chinese audiences’ perception of GRIM through the mediating roles of perceived sexism in American and Korean dramas and their general sexism values.

Progress marks a way of understanding Latin America in terms of what it lacks, what it should be yearning for and seeking. Historically, the idea of progress served to legitimate the region’s submission to a world order marked by colonial capitalist and imperialist rule. Comparison of the modern ideal of progress with developmentalism, particularly as defined by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and criticism of “progress” as legitimation arising out of the intersection of postdevelopmentalist thought with the ideology of Good Living shows that the idea continues to haunt the postcolonial pursuit of a free Latin America. O progresso baliza uma forma de abordagem da América Latina pela falta, pelo o que ela deve ansiar e buscar. Historicamente, a ideia de progresso passou a legitimar a submissão da região a uma ordem mundial marcada pelo domínio capitalista colonial e imperialista. Frente ao ideário moderno de progresso, as formas tomadas pelo desenvolvimentismo, marcadamente no âmbito das orientaçãoes da Comissão Econômica para a América Latina e o Caribe, e as críticas ao progresso como legitimação surgidas no bojo do entrecruzamento do pensamento pós-desenvolvimentista com o ideário do Bem Viver mostram que a ideia de progresso se mantém como um fantasma perante abordagens pós-coloniais das possibilidades de livre desabrochamento latino-americano.

The trope of the repressive Muslim, obstinately attached to their regressive world views, recalcitrant antagoniser of modernity, has become a thoroughly familiar drama. Redundant spectacles abound: events often highly mediatised, substantiated by conservativism and liberalism alike, deployed as justification for policing, surveillance and invasion. The 2019 protests against the ‘No Outsiders’ LGBT lessons held in Birmingham, England are one such spectacle. Foregoing the dominant portrayal of the protests as an event of Muslim homophobia, I instead examine the social processes that render the event exceptional in the British imaginary and the statecraft it subsequently enables. First, the protests’ production as a spectacular event is analysed through the historical conditions of Europe’s self-constitution through Islam-as-Threat. It is through liberalism’s amnesiac frame, one that erases its imperial and racist culpability, that the sexual exceptionalism that undergirds the spectacle of the protests can be understood. Second, reading the protests ‘sideways’, I argue, reveals how the displacement of homophobia onto Muslims continues liberalism’s tradition of situating its Others as oppositional to its purported gendered and sexual freedoms. In this context, sex education as deradicalisation of Muslim pupils becomes normalised, even as British liberalism disavows racism. Thirdly, the inclusion of queer Muslims as the authentic voice emerging from the cross-sections of queer and Muslim identity is critiqued as a ‘non-performativity’. Rather than offering a relational understanding of queer, Muslim and queer Muslim vulnerabilities, this inclusion elides an intersectional analysis of British homonationalism. I conclude by arguing for ‘an unalienated politics’ that is vigilant to co-optation, refusing to treat queerness as an exceptional site of injury. As such, how can we imagine the ‘queer’ in queer Muslim as a political position that refuses to capitulate to the hierarchisation of the human?

Pubs have served as a collective representation through which the collective identity of ‘Irish society’ has been articulated during the crisis of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As such they offer a case study of how meaning making occurs in contemporary periods of social crisis. While the neoliberal era is widely interpreted as period involving a process of desymbolisation in which meaning giving traditions are undermined, in this period of social crisis long-established and authoritative narratives drawn from collective memory circulated to articulate the meaning of the pandemic for the collective identity in the sense of its nature, character, boundaries, ‘others’, and moral duties and sacrifices that membership implied. Highly stereotyped images of the sacred moral core of the collective as represented by publicans who embodied qualities of age and maturity, rural, cultural-nationalist identity and a post Land War ideal of community-oriented owner-proprieters appeared. Similarly conventional representations of the immoral enemies within, who threaten to morally and literally infect the community, can be seen in representations of venues and drinkers who embody youth, the urban crowd and mixing. The ‘other’ through which identity is articulated against was represented through Britishness, which was shown as the source of the undesirable aspects of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Irish Journal of Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, I argue that Habermas’s genealogical approach to modern reason and methodological agnosticism can lead us to a better understanding of the role of religion in our societies. I underline the relevance of Habermas’s awareness that ‘something is missing’ when we take faith out of modernity and consider the truths of philosophical reason to be infallible. Habermas succeeds in highlighting the complexity of the modern relationship between the religious and the secular domains, a relationship that is not merely epistemic, but also embodied in various practical relationships between religious and secular citizens. On this basis, and in the light of Habermas’s idea of modernity as an unfinished project, I argue that religion can be interpreted as a dimension allied to political modernity and democracy as well.

This symposium offers EEPS audience insights to the process of peer review to which manuscripts submitted to the journal are subjected. It is composed of the original paper (titled “Re-enchanting Modernity in the East and West: Comparative Perspectives on the Legacy of 1968”), reviews and additional comments by the three reviewers, and the author’s response. It illustrates the variety of criteria typically used by reviewers – and editors – in their assessment of submitted research papers and essays, as well as the options available to their authors in response. The symposium is also a contribution to the ongoing debates on the topic of the manuscript in question: the legacies of the tumultuous year 1968 and the contributions of the generation defined by those events to the intellectual, political, and other dimensions of public affairs in the East and the West.

Our contemporary moment is a moment of crisis of epistemology as a part of the wider and deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. The crisis of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crisis of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within the Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context that the present essay discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. It also discusses some of the limits of de Sousa Santos’ alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological in his exploration of epistemological alternatives beyond the Eurocentric canons. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations together in transformative and cross-cultural ways. This helps us in going beyond both the limits of the primacy of epistemology in modernity as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of a new hermeneutics which involves walking and meditating across multiple topoi of cultures and traditions of thinking and reflections which is called multi- topial hermeneutics in this study. This involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world which help us go beyond ethnocentrism and eurocentrism and cultivate conversations and realisations across borders what the essay calls planetary realisations.

This article addresses – from a theoretical and historical perspective – the discussion on republicanism and populism, in connection to different ways of conceiving political modernity. It places republicanism and populism within the framework of contemporary democracies in the Latin American context, looking at the reciprocal interaction between these political traditions, and their relevance for understanding the current challenges of the liberal model in the region.

Nuclear power plants, with their promise of boundless cheap energy, are archetypal figures of progress modernity. As we acknowledge the limits of industrial progress and growth-based capital, places for where the dream is now over, and whose inhabitants are finding ways of living through its transition, offer emergent practical ontologies based on maintenance, bricolage and necessity. Through the case study of the atomic city of Visaginas, Lithuania, this paper addresses the question of how to account for forms of life that emerge in the aftermath of high modernity. Here, infrastructures operate as residual cultural and material resources for practical ontologies and world building after progress. Building on emerging scholarship on the political aesthetics of infrastructure, I suggest that their ontological transition involves what Fisher describes as the ‘memory of lost futures’, a future anterior that, through the remains of material connections, technocultures and cultural memory, provide limits and conditions for emergent ways of living ‘after progress.’

This paper examines intergenerational differences and similarities in value preferences among three generations of the Russian ethnic minorities in two North Caucasus republics of the Russian Federation. It also compares them with value preferences of three generations of Russians in the Central Federal District around Moscow and those of indigenous North Caucasus residents. The sample included 479 grandparent–parent–adolescent triads. Data were obtained using Schwartz’s Revised Portrait Values Questionnaire. Scores for Schwartz’s four higher-order value types (Openness to Change, Self-Enhancement, Conservation, and Self-Transcendence) were calculated. Analyses of variance showed that intergenerational differences were strongest for Openness values. For the three other values, preferences of grandparents and parents differed less than did preferences of parents and their offspring. Repeated measures analyses of covariance, controlling for differences in age, gender, and educational attainment in the five cultural groups, showed that intergenerational differences were moderated by cultural context. Intergenerational differences were consistently widest in the Central Federal District. Generally, value preferences of contemporary adolescents, their parents, and their grandparents are drifting apart in the most “modern” part of the Russian Federation, whereas in the periphery, the generations are staying more closely together, largely regardless of people’s ethnic belonging.

The article develops a theoretical framework for the critical examination of cinematic tourist design. Considering ‘film-induced tourism’ as part of a bigger system involving the design of mobilities, it interrogates the connection between the aesthetic and ethical principles that end up informing the engineering of national hospitality in media platforms. The design, which is managed by a ‘worldmaking authority’ or network encompassing the host nation state and international tourist and media markets, conforms to the rationalised rules of what Boltanski and Chiapello termed the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, which mobilises romantic ideals of individual freedom to sell landscapes and exotic cultural characters. The phased development of such mobilities conforms to contingency and is indifferent to the welfare of particular social groups. The model is exemplified through the phased design of mobilities out of two films with virulent sexist and antisemitic content centred on the journeys of the fictional Kazakh journalist Borat to the United States.

This article attempts to use emotion as the core concept to explore the historical pedigree of China. Chinese culture has always attached great importance to emotion. Traditional Chinese rule was highly dependent on notions of human kindness and compassion. Since the encounter with the Western world, the Chinese revolution gave birth to a unique emotional mode, and this had a great impact on the Chinese society. Contemporary China bid farewell to the revolution and started its market-oriented reforms. An emotional mode of consumerism has become the dominant one. Based on Raymond Williams’s theory of structure of feeling, this article divides the emotional patterns in Chinese history into the traditional structure of feeling, the revolutionary structure of feeling and the consumerist structure of feeling. This does not mean a simplified analysis of history and its complex emotional patterns, but an attempt to explore the complex interaction and social consequences of these models.

In this commentary, I follow up on Chandler and Pugh’s (2021) article, ‘Anthropocene Islands: There Are Only Islands After the End of the World’, to explore two central facets of their argument. First, I explore just why analyses of dynamic patterns of relational entanglements in island environments are particularly detrimental to modernist fantasies of a dichotomous world. Second, I critique whether the frame of ‘the Anthropocene’ is the most accurate way to depict the emerging knowledges of relationality in island (and other) geographies.

Zygmunt Bauman addressed spatiotemporal compression as a critical aspect of the transition from solid to liquid modernity. In this transition, speed and flexibility came to define the conditions of social life which no longer relied on spatiotemporal separation as the basis of all power relations. But digitization of these conditions raises the question of whether the present phase of modernity depicts a resolidification of capital and power that exploits the fluidity of a densely intermediated world. By treating databases as the new localities of power, the digital operations inherent to their utility and productivity render the systemic nature of intermediation as solid as the power relations of the pre-digital era. The example of mass surveillance demonstrates the solidity of a new power derived from surreptitious data gathering and collation in populations attuned to intermediation as a way of life. A new mass culture is emerging through spaces of power that have reset speed in the service of datafication. This is not simply a culture of mobility and choice but one prefabricated and utilized for advancing the redesigned solidity of a digitized modernity.

In the most general sense, the modern idea of history is a conceptual tool deployed in order to domesticate experienced novelty and expectations of the future. In Western modernity, the operation we usually call historicization has been nothing other than an operation of temporal domestication: the integration of experienced and expected novelty into a larger processual scheme we associate with modern historical time. Based on these theoretical considerations, this article has a dual objective. First, through an analysis of historical approaches to the Anthropocene—that exemplifies present-day perceived radical novelty—it attempts to identify the linguistic-conceptual means of temporal domestication through historical time. Second, it raises the question of the politics of historical time today by focusing on the evaluative aspects of temporal domestication in an age when the future increasingly appears a threat. As a brief conclusion, the article calls for broader recognition of what it calls a plurihistoricity of “historical” transitions, the co-existence of multiple kinds of transformation and change over time.

The perspective of looking at certain stalwarts of the Indian Freedom Struggle revolves around their acts which shaped times they lived in. These acts were widely considered as reactions to the prevailing discrepancies in the country’s social, political, economic and religious life. Consequently, the philosophical basis behind such action could not be elaborately and extensively articulated or analysed and thus, what ensued was a crude description of personalities. So seemed to be the case of Babasaheb Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891–1956) who was recognized as a social reformer and political leader with a vision of social, political and economic inclusion of the Depressed Classes (Dalits) in mainstream society. But his ability to question the structures of society and religion which had come from consciousness developed out of education, remained neglected in academia for a long time. After significant recent work became available regarding views on education, he was accepted as an ‘educator’. However, the influence of his educational philosophy in the nation-building process needs to be further explored since he opposed the dominant nationalist discourse.

This article clarifies and revises the sociological theory of voluntary risk taking known as edgework. The concept has three distinct aspects: material practices, embodied experiences, and supporting structures. I first provide a critical summary of these aspects as they exist in the current literature. Second, I advocate for an approach to edgework through the analysis of symbolic practices. I argue that researchers can best understand the meaning of voluntary risk taking by studying how individuals discursively frame their actions. Given the ascendency of neoliberal ideology in contemporary Western societies, there is an increasing importance for research into risk (especially as it relates to the study of sports), and a cogent sociology of edgework can be an important component to such an intellectual endeavor.

Examining the Russian state’s turn to ‘traditional values’ in the 2010s, this article aims to understand traditionalist state discourses in a global context where LGBT inclusion has been incorporated into notions of national exceptionalism. It argues that the Putin regime has articulated, provided ideological coherence to, and made visible a narrative according to which resistance to LGBT rights appears as a logical choice for states seeking to position themselves in opposition to the ‘liberal West.’ That narrative both counters the homonationalist idea of ‘gay-friendliness’ as a signifier of modernity and good statehood and incorporates some of its elements, notably externalization of homophobia onto racialized, Muslim Others.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger hold firmly entrenched places within the canon of modern philosophy. And rightly so: both are penetrating critics of liberal modernity. Yet we need to ask ourselves whether, as academics teaching these thinkers, we are doing full justice to the more disturbing aspects of their thought. They don’t simply interrogate the axioms of modern life as a subject for intellectual reflection; they have a praxis-oriented project to demolish the post-1789 moral-political dispensation that we tend to take for granted and replace it with a new radically illiberal and anti-egalitarian dispensation. The task of reconsidering the perils of going too easy on these thinkers, or giving them the benefit of the doubt, is made more urgent by the apparent return of fascist or ‘fascoid’ modes of politics, and in particular, the emergence of a far-right intelligentsia all too keen to appropriate these thinkers for far-right purposes.

As a medium for delivering modernity, movie theaters have faithfully recorded the dialogue between modernity and local daily lives. In contrast to modern movie theaters, traditional cinemas are distinguished by their long history, through which they reflect the changing connotations and social construction of modernity over time. Based on detailed analysis of the historical and social characteristics of Nanguan cinema, a 100-year-old movie theater in Guangzhou, China, we reach the following two conclusions: first, shaped by local traditional culture, the practice of moviegoing localizes modernity with a distinctive grassroots feature that enlivens everyday lives; second, moviegoing at traditional theaters in modern metropolitan areas has further enriched the connotations of modernity by providing a nostalgic experience for audiences.

This article reviews three Japanese sociological theorists, who explore the nature of modernity, or late modernity, in relation to the postmodern assumption that modernization, or late modernization, is far from a single-track evolutionary process. In his criticism of viewing the modernization theory via an indigenous perspective, Yosuke Koto considers the exogenous impacts of advanced countries to illuminate the hybrid nature of modernity. Based on cognitive sociology, Masataka Katagiri explores the transformation of the self during individualization since the 19th century to illuminate several aspects of individualization in late modernity. In contrast to the symbolic model of modern sociological theories since Durkheim, Takeshi Mikami develops a diabolic theory that reveals a new perspective on the connection between individuals and society in late modernity. Referring to Japan as an important case study, these three sociological theorists provide theoretical insights on some of the complex aspects of late modernity.

Honor killing is a serious social problem in some countries that is yet to be adequately explained and addressed. We start with an overview of the conceptualization of this phenomenon and review its global prevalence. We argue that honor killing cannot be fully explained by focusing only on religion and sexism. We present a feminist Durkheimian analysis of honor killing as a form of informal social control and argue that honor killing represents a ‘dark side of modernity’ in which the systematic marginalization and stigmatization of minorities and social groups have led them to rely more on traditional honor codes as a kind of informal social control, exacerbating honor crimes. We discuss how a more effective approach to combat honor killing requires not only addressing the issues of sexism and religious fundamentalism, but also the systematic exclusion and stigmatization of local groups and minorities.

The last two decades have witnessed a notable proliferation of media industries producing low-budget digital films and music videos. These media industries routinely stage a confrontation between modernity and a fantasy of pure cultural traditions. The bulk of their content deploys the male star as an extraordinary crossover figure – the only one capable of bringing modernity and its vernacular outsides on the negotiating table. Drawing upon the trajectory of Bhojpuri media industry – referring to the language spoken in parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar – this paper discusses, via Bruno Latour, the fundamental discord at the heart of modernity. I argue that the libidinal economy has emerged as a narrative simplification of the purifying imperative of modernity, haunted as it is by the concurrent hybridizing force-field.

This article seeks to materialize social theories of modern temporalities. It proposes a tempo-material analysis of carbon resources like coal, oil, and gas to illuminate how fossil materialities both underpin and undermine modern temporalities and introduce the notion of fossil modernity to evoke an understanding of the modern composed of multiple conflicting modes of material temporality. Fossil resources (fossil fuels and petrochemical substances) drive the pace and progressive perspective of modernity. The residuals of these resources (CO2, plastic waste, and petrochemical toxins) confront societies with long-lasting ecological damage. Fossil fuels helped to produce the expectation of growth and endless possibility. Fossil residuals create a horizon of ecological liabilities in which past options have become future obligations. This renders the pretences of “modernization” understood as a process of constant renewal and innovation problematic. The article argues that modern societies cannot simply overcome their material–temporal predicaments through “decarbonization” because even after a shift to solar power, organic agriculture, and sustainable plastics, the fossil past will continue to influence, inform, and incite social operations. The article thus shows how different responses to the problems of fossil modernity need to go back to and emerge from the material residues of the past: this goes for bio-capitalist projects seeking to “recycle” the entropic temporality of fossil residuals as well as for environmental justice movements that decipher these residuals as indexes of social asymmetries and call for socio-ecological “redistribution.”

Starting in the late-nineteenth century, Polish national elites considered emigration a ‘necessary evil’ that alleviated local economic pressures. In the face of an exodus from all of the partitions, leaders of many political persuasions worked to channel the emigration of peasants towards destinations such as Paraná, where a ‘New Poland’ could be built. In the 1920s, the emerging inter-war Polish state created a sprawling emigration apparatus that adjusted the old policies to the new circumstances. This article traces the consecutive turns in the Polish government’s attitude towards emigration to South America, demonstrating the ways in which they mirrored broader European discourses and responded to systemic changes around the globe. Moreover, in line with the recent scholarship that points to the legacies of empire in inter-war Eastern Europe, the article also examines the relationship between the post-imperial nature of the nascent Polish state and its ‘colonial’ emigration policies.

This article focuses on Fascist artist Mario Sironi’s urban landscapes as a site of modernity and its contradictions. With their gloomy buildings and deserted streets, Sironi’s landscapes highlight two of modernity's woes: The periferia of the “liberal” city and the fear for its inhabitants’ degeneration and sterility. In his “Il discorso dell’Ascensione,” Mussolini openly accuses industrial urbanism of its sterilizing effect on the Italian race, thus, jeopardizing his imperial ambitions. By giving an aesthetic form to the Regime’s fears, Sironi reaches two goals: The aestheticization of fascist politics, as described by Walter Benjamin, and the creation of the Soreal social myth that would ultimately propel Italians toward the resolution of their presumed problems. Moreover, the article suggests a reading of Sironi’s murals as an integral part of the urban landscapes’ reading and interpretation. The murals’ fascist imperial rhetoric would lose its referent should the Italian race succumb to physical degeneration and sterility.