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Abstract: This study explores the pivotal concept of “objective possibility” within Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to “objective possibility” and related terms in essays like “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness,” emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term’s roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber’s methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber’s use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel’s dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action.

In this article, we discuss the de-reifying role of art and its relation with humanity's self-consciousness, as these are captured in Lukács' aesthetic thought and, especially, in his work The Specificity of the Aesthetic. Through the discourse on both categories that traverse Lukács oeuvre (totality, reification, imputed consciousness, etc.) and exclusively aesthetic categories (typical, particular, catharsis, mimesis, etc.), we attempt to give prominence to the way in which Lukács conceives artwork's contribution to the cultivation of humanity's self-consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mathematics Education (ME), research dealing with topic-specific (TS) issues (e.g., what levels of development exist in learning fractions) produces usually local results and is considered less fashionable and attractive for innovative research projects than research dealing with context-specific (CS) issues that have more general and abstract scopes (e.g., what is mathematical instruction? what is the field of ME?) and produces middle-range or grand theories. TS- and CS-research run along separate tracks with little or no crossover, at least from the beginning of the socio-political-turn in ME, but connecting them could help to single out hidden variables in CS-research. This paper shows that TS-research creates specific mathematical objects that allow us to reduce the distance between these two lines of research. Mathematical objects specific to ME research are shown to be both a technical link between the two lines of research because they allow topic-specificity to access more abstract and general realms of research, as well as factor at stake when aspects related to the social, political, and ethical implications of the ontological creativity of TS-research are discussed in a critical postmodern approach. Discussing its impact on textbooks, teacher-training, teaching practices, further TS-research-practices, as well as on the researcher's epistemological empowerment and on the self-referentiality of ME research, TS-research moves from the periphery to the heart of CS-research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article makes a case that CTS scholarship is always, necessarily, and specifically paradigmatically violent, even if one adopts CTS' critiques of "mainstream" terrorism studies and understands CTS scholars to be normatively well-intended. In making that case, this article goes over different violences of CTS scholarship which have important impacts in the field and in the "real world" from which the field often distinguishes itself: the (often unreflected) reification of "terrorism" discourses, the (often uncritical) engagement with P/CVE initiatives, the construction and perpetuation of gendered and racialised ideas of agency in "terrorism" and "counterterrorism," and the complex publication and citations practices in the field. The article then argues that the effects of these violences are made more intense by the violences involved with research reflexivity in the field, and even in this article. It concludes by discussing possible futures for a CTS, which acknowledges its own violences and looks to understand and even possibly redirect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research project examines the role of Instagram in shaping adolescent girls' body image perceptions. First, it analyses the representations conveyed by the network and the gender discourses it articulates, in order to identify the strategies - visual and linguistic - used by the most popular influencers to understand the discourses on corporeality. The structural-semiological content analysis of the five Instagram profiles of the most followed influencers in Spain of the so-called Z-generation provides insights into the prevalence of gender stereotypes and roles and offers a reflection on the prevention of the phenomenon of objectification and self-objectification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "27 Club" refers to the widespread legend that notable people, particularly musicians, are unusually likely to die at age 27. A 2011 inquiry in The BMJ showed this is not the case, dismissing the 27 Club as a myth. We expand on this discourse by demonstrating that although the existence of the phenomenon cannot be empirically validated, it is real in its consequences. Using Wikipedia data, we show that while age 27 does not hold greater risk of mortality for notable persons, those who died at 27 are as a group exceptionally notable compared to those who died at other young ages. The 27 Club legend originated from a statistically improbable event circa 1970, wherein four superstar musicians died within the span of 2 y all at age 27. This coincidence captured the public imagination such that our fascination with the 27 Club brought itself into being, producing greater interest in those who died at age 27 than would have been otherwise. This demonstrates path dependence in cultural evolution, whereby an effectively random event evolves into a narrative that shapes otherwise unrelated events and thus the way we make and interpret history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe key concepts and reference points of International Relations (IR) are informed by a sedentarist worldview anchored on the territorial state. IR’s conception of its subject-matter is thus ‘static’ in both senses of the word: state-centric and immobile. One of the consequences of this sedentarist worldview has been a neglect of the world’s nomads. Defined by their spatial mobility, nomads have been either ignored or, less frequently, brought in as an exceptional ‘Other’ against which concepts such as statehood and territoriality can be defined. The interventions in this forum challenge IR’s sedentarism by recovering the world’s nomads as international political actors past and present, thus enriching the range of empirical cases upon which IR scholars may build their theories and challenging teleological narratives that view the history of the international system as the inevitable triumph of the territorial state. At the same time, the forum cautions against the reification of the nomad as the ‘Other’ of the state by disaggregating nomadism from mobility and problematising the sedentarism/nomadism binary. The goal of the forum is not to provide a blueprint for how IR scholars should study nomads, but to promote a critical reflexivity about IR’s sedentarist assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses the intersection of the novel and neoliberalism as a relation of friction (Tsing). Whereas former studies of literature and neoliberalism imply models of resistance or complicity, the model of friction allows us to read novels as exploring possibilities of life and creativity within the worlds of neoliberal reification. We apply this model to contemporary autofiction: Kamers antikamers by Niña Weijers and How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. Differing from idealist accounts of neoliberalism and a capitalist view of the subject as ‘entrepreneur of the self’, we engage a materialist approach that looks at the subject as a ‘gamer’ (Wark) whose affective and cognitive skills get reified into information. We conclude that both novels foreground the desire to find possibilities of life in affective attachments, which in their turn open up possibilities of difference and creativity in the context of neoliberal abstraction and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grasping mathematical objects as related to processes is often considered critical for mathematics understanding. Yet, the ontology of mathematical objects remains under debate. In this paper, we theoretically oppose internalist approaches that claim mental entities as the endpoints of process–object transitions and externalist approaches that stress mathematical artifacts—such as physical manipulatives and formulas—as constituting mathematical objects. We search for a view on process–object duality that overcomes the dualism of mind and body. One such approach is commognition that describes mathematical objects as discursive entities. This paper expands the nature of mathematical objects beyond discourse and highlights the role of learners' interaction with the environment by adopting ecological onto-epistemology. We develop a functional dynamic systems perspective on process–object duality in mathematics learning emphasizing embodied actions and the re-invention of artifacts' affordances. As a main result, we reconsider process–object duality as a reification of repetitive actions into a cultural artifact that consists of two steps: (1) forming a new sensory-motor coordination that brings new perception to the fore and (2) crystallizing a new artifact in a mathematical environment that captures this new perception. An empirical example from research on embodied action-based design for trigonometry illustrates our theoretical ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In debates about the role(s) and scale of entrepreneurial philanthropy in democracies, scholars discuss the erosion of distinctive public and private spheres and interests, and the replacement of the public sphere. This has occurred at the expense of public deliberation and participation, in favor of the reification of individuals and the role of experts/expertise. Drawing upon John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927/2016), I argue that there is an eclipse of the publicity of the public. This informs my case for the (re)conceptualization of philanthropy as a public, characterized by (a) the philanthropist as a social rather than an atomistic being, (b) the philanthropy-state dynamic and the publics' claims, and (c) part of the radical vision of philanthropy. To ensure that private and public have analytical and practical resonance, it is imperative to (re)frame and (re)conceptualize what these concepts mean to entrepreneurial philanthropy and for its role in democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called 'late stage' capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's seminal 1996 edited collection of the same name suggests, is that the construction of the monster in popular culture is fraught with the boundaries that constitute the society that has spawned them; the monstrous body "exists only to be read" (p. 4). Bringing together the theoretical insights of the Marxist theory of reification, critical animal studies, and monster theory, this article examines the ways in which cinematic depictions of gigantic monstrosity can inform our theorizing of multispecies relationships under capitalism. Specifically, I explore how the tensions between capital and human-animal relationships serve to construct and constitute the multiform monster, Jean Jacket, in Jordan Peele's 2022 film Nope. Through an examination of the multispecies relationalities that the film portrays, I argue that the figure of Jean Jacket is a monstrous culmination of the reified and therefore, necessarily deferred nature of human-animal relationships under capital. However, Nope's conclusion alerts us to the radical dereifying potential of multispecies bonds of care and embodied knowledge; systems of resistance that can be forged even within our current capitalist ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Kohei Saito's ecological Marxism, reification explains how formal economic categories lead to ecological crisis. Saito, however, lacks an account of praxis; of the collective political agency capable of overcoming reification. The relationship between reification and praxis was a central motif of Georg Lukács' early Marxist work. An integrated concept of reification could then fill this gap in Saito's theory, thereby illuminating the political transition towards ecosocialism. Further, by resolving the ambiguous status of "nature" in Lukács critical theory, which currently blocks the possibility of such a conceptual integration, the critique of reification can be extended to the natural sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tabayyun is the property of Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies 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.)

This article delves into the processes of disability disclosure, cripped experiences and a particular theoretical flight with posthuman subjectivity. The article critiques disability disclosure for coercively reifying cripped experiences into normative narratives. Moreover, disclosures determine coercive and performative regimes in educational contexts, where disciplinary power defines possible experiences for cripped folks. Drawing on Foucault's and Butler's works to ground our conversations of reification and coercion, I then pull on and complement Deleuze and Guattari's works to argue that disclosure places the nonsensicality of disability outside conventional determinations of sense, defining the cripped being as nonbeing to maintain the productive boundaries of sense/nonsense. Finally, I play with crippedness that refuses definition and disclosure as a posthuman subjectivity that celebrates fluidity, multiplicity and nonsense. My final section of the article offers a cripped path where the disabled, posthuman subject resists sense‐making and embraces multiplicity, fluidity and nonsensicality as a particularly embodied refusal. This article critically explores the reifying nature of disclosure while envisioning possibilities where crip and posthuman studies converge, promising a shift towards imagining posthuman subjects that honour the nonsensical and multiplicitous nature of cripped experiences that refuse disclosure/definition qua reification, coercion and sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines the emergent phenomena of AI-generated and NFT art through the lens of Georg Lukács’ theory of reification and its existential implications. Lukács argued that under capitalism, social relations and human experiences are transformed into objective, quantifiable commodities, leading to a fragmented and alienated consciousness. Applying this framework to AI and NFT art, these technologies can be said to represent extreme examples of the reification of art and creativity in the digital age. AI art generators reduce artistic production to abstract, computable properties divorced from lived experience, while NFTs transform digital art into speculative commodities, imposing the logic of private property and exchange value onto the previously open domain of online culture. The existential dimension of this reification is explored, raising questions about the nature of creativity, originality, and the value of art in an increasingly financialized and automated world. The article suggests that a Lukácsian critique must not only diagnose the reified character of these cultural forms but also identify their potential for resistance and transformation, pointing toward a re-humanized and emancipatory vision of art in the digital age. Contemporary theorists such as Tiziana Terranova, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Benjamin Noys are invoked to further elucidate these issues.

Introduction: Psychiatric diagnoses are descriptive in nature, but the lay public commonly misconceives them as causal explanations. It is not known whether this logical error, a form of circular reasoning, can sometimes be mistakenly reinforced by health authorities themselves. In this study, we investigated the prevalence of misleading causal descriptions of depression in the information provided by authoritative mental health organizations on widely accessed internet sites. Methods: We searched for popular websites managed by leading mental health organizations and conducted a content analysis to evaluate whether they presented depression accurately as a description of symptoms, or inaccurately as a causal explanation. Results: Most websites used language that inaccurately described depression as a causal explanation to depressive symptoms. Conclusion: Leading professional medical and psychiatric organizations commonly confound depression, a descriptive diagnostic label, with a causal explanation on their most prominently accessed informational websites. We argue that the scientifically inaccurate causal language in depictions of psychiatric diagnoses is potentially harmful because it leads the public to misunderstand the nature of mental health problems. Mental health authorities providing psychoeducation should clearly state that psychiatric diagnoses are purely descriptive to avoid misleading the public. Plain Language Summary: Most psychiatric diagnoses are descriptive: They describe states of mental distress and dysfunction but do not in themselves contain causal explanations. Nonetheless, diagnoses in psychiatry are commonly talked about as if they are concrete entities that explain the symptoms they describe. In this study, we examined whether health organizations themselves contribute to this logical fallacy. We searched for popular websites managed by leading mental health organizations, and evaluated whether they discussed the diagnosis of depression accurately as a description, or inaccurately as a cause for depressive symptoms. We found that the majority of websites presented depression as a cause, instead of a description of symptoms. We discuss the potential harmful consequences of inaccurately presenting descriptive psychiatric diagnoses as causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of GENDER: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH 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.)

Copyright of GENDER: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH 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.)

Far-right attacker manifestos provide researchers and practitioners with insights into the thoughts, beliefs, and motivations of their authors. However, a systematic analysis of the gendered ways in which these attackers construct and present their experiences and opinions has not yet been produced. This study fills that gap by analysing the presentations of masculinity across 19 far-right manifestos authored by men. Discourse analysis of terrorist manifestos can unearth where mainstream and extremist discourses coalesce: which elements are taken from the mainstream and embedded into extremist discourse, and what parts of extremist discourse are utilised by mainstream actors. Drawing on the theories of Connell, Firestone, and Laclau, I argue that the attackers in this study discursively construct themselves as men in reference to hegemonic ideas of what constitutes "the man" in Western society. They also attempt to justify their actions and mobilise others to do the same by appealing to "the (white) child" and the duty of themselves as (white) men to protect it. Women are almost entirely neglected in the manifestos, which reflects sexist attitudes surrounding women's agency and presence in society. This paper contributes to the understanding of hegemony and gender in far-right discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glenn Diaz's The Quiet Ones explores people's lives in the labor force created by a global market system. Work, public services, geography, identities, production, and consumption are generally shaped and directed by the flow of boundary-less foreign capital investments from developed countries. The novel presents characters as workers in the business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines, expatriates as highly skilled workers who migrated to the country to look for better economic and social capital opportunities, and the various relationships with people surrounding these workers. This paper charts the terrain, nature, and the systemic movements of capital through (1) capital-as-presence in the text, framing or creating work patterns, human relationships, consumption behavior, and (2) space-as-absence that mediates relationships between states, citizens, and the State (represented by the law and state authorities), between citizens as workers, between citizens as workers and their cities. The paper concludes that the neoliberal economic agenda in/of globalization created a language where capital is deeply embedded in a textual negotiation of/in meanings that legitimizes the power structure that perpetuates, supports, enables, and reinforces an oppressive elite, imperialist, and capitalist economic market system as the only alternative in rendering a concrete livable world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits Lukács's and Adorno's analyses of reification to articulate a diagnosis that accounts both for its tendencies towards authoritarianism and its emancipatory potentials. Despite their divergences, Lukács's conception of the proletariat as 'identical subject-object of history' and Adorno's diagnosis of 'the end of psychology' in the authoritarian masses seem to converge on a similar outcome. Through opposite paths, they both culminate in the elimination of the subject-object distinction, leading the critique of reification to a political impasse. However, this alternative is rooted in partial interpretations of Lukács's and Adorno's arguments. As I contend, one can reconstruct Lukács's analysis in a way that portrays emancipatory subjectivity not as hostile to otherness but as driven by the material limits of reification, or what Adorno termed the non-identical. Correspondingly, in light of Lukács, Adorno's diagnosis can be read in a way that the end of psychology, far from negating the possibility of emancipation, serves as its driving force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, storytelling has been popularised as a method for societal sustainability transformations. With this growing popularity, there has also been a rapid increase in those identifying as storytellers. Perhaps because storytelling for sustainability has an innocent ring to it, it has not yet been studied from a power perspective. However, as it is fast-spreading and has explicit change purposes, it is important to clarify assumptions about knowledge, power and change. This article offers a first step towards understanding and evaluating the wide variety of applications behind the label of storytelling for sustainability. We perform a frame analysis of how storytellers describe their storytelling for sustainability. Our findings demonstrate that the label of storytelling for sustainability encompasses fundamentally different ideas about whose knowledge counts. The article raises critical questions that can help assess the legitimacy and appropriateness of different applications of storytelling for sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to propose a posthumanist approach to the issue of (non/religious) identity. Reflections at the intersection between posthumanism, study of religion, and identities help to better understand and clarify how core elements of posthumanism such as the decentring and relativization of the Human and the Anthropos do not mean that human beings don’t matter at all, but they point out a specific, supposedly universal concept of Man. In this sense, central is an intersectional approach to identity and difference. While identity has always been constructed on dichotomies, Posthumanism, following previous forms of deconstruction, emphasizes the multiplicity of identities, their constructedness, and their constant multiple recombinations in innovative forms. An integrated posthumanist approach to the intersection of different aspects and components of identity, including non/religious ones, has the potential for highlighting both the idea that identity is not a monolithic concept, and the risks linked to a reification of something ultimately constructed—as it happens with identity politics, but also with its critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the co-making processes that blur the boundaries between religion and economy? How can we move past misleading metaphors and analogies that reify the false distinction between sacred and secular or that frame religion as pure essences corrupted by financialization? Inspired by McLaughlin et al.’s (2020) call for increased attention to the “corporate form of religion,” we outline how common social structural and aspirational elements undergird shared processes of both religion-making and corporation-making. Drawing on ethnographic and historical data from contributing authors to this Special Issue, we hypothesize that the reification of religion and business is context dependent, benefits regimes of power, and is open to contestation; and that some intentional communities, purposeful or not, have from their inception been understood as neither religious nor corporate. We marshal global data from diverse case studies to explore the modes of relatedness between religions and corporations, on the one hand, and the context-specific boundary-making practices that reify a false binary, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary capitalist totalitarianism, by distorting the humanizing capacity of knowledge, enables actions that degrade the assets that make existence possible in dignified conditions, configuring itself as a hypostasis of mercantile globalization; counter-logic that increases the extraction of resources as a correlate of the accumulation of capital. Overcoming the current crises deserves to deconstruct the principles of neoliberal science as alienating reification of reality; it requests the conformation of knowledge based on the cognitive plural condition in the face of the complex situation of reality. This research has the purpose of analyzing the scientific sacralization as an extension and instrument of the fetishism of merchandise; It benefits the formation of livable societies by evidencing human rights in democratic governments. It is a diachronic bibliographical study, structured from the deductive rationalist approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses assemblage theory to consider the work that community does in a residential neighborhood in Toronto, Canada. It utilizes assemblage theory and connections between assemblage, affect, and emotion to advance an understanding of how community shapes capacity and action. The analysis shows how community has been enacted on the Islands, what actions and tendencies this assemblage makes possible or likely, and what it constrains. It also contributes to understanding what assemblage analysis can do. The mechanisms by which desire is channeled toward certain kinds of actions in the assemblage include the performance of community for self-preservation, the use of history and memory in the making of the community assemblage, and the role of territoriality, identity, and belonging in community-preserving actions. The analysis also reveals processes of stasis through reification of the assemblage and its interdependence with other processes like racial capitalism. Finally, I propose possibilities for shifting the assemblage, including telling different histories, and greeting emotional intensity experimentally. Seeing community through the lens of assemblage enables us to ask different questions, which may help us build the communities we need for a more just future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concept analysis is a useful qualitative research method for psychologists aiming to define, clarify or critique concept meaning and use in theory, practice or research. This article explains Reformative Concept Analysis (RCA), a novel method derived from nursing and political science concept analysis approaches, and reformed for applied psychology research. First, the role of concepts as epistemological vessels in psychological theory and practice is described. Some problems with concept use in clinical practice and research are highlighted, to demonstrate why critical analytic methods to improve concept definition and utility are needed. Then, overviews of some existing concept analysis methods are provided, with summaries of their strengths and limitations from an applied psychology perspective. The importance of comparing and combining meaning frameworks constructed from qualitative narratives and literature review is highlighted. Finally, the eight stages of RCA method are set out, along with some ontological, epistemological, design, rigour and presentation considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Psychosozial is the property of Psychosozial-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG 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.)

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we are living in a transition from the “era of things to the era of non-things”. According to his perspective, things do not determine the world we live in: information does. Consequently, the profession of translation has become increasingly mechanized to meet the high demand for “information”, turning readers into compulsive consumers of words. Thus, there is a significant risk of confusing the symbolic representation of words with essential reality, neglecting the importance of context and paratext in the construction of meaning. This phenomenon can lead to a loss of meaning in the act of translation, diminishing its role as a bridge between cultures and languages. Borrowing from the axiom of Portuguese intellectual Rui Pereira in a society of “non-thought”, it is crucial to reflect on how “translating in times of non-translation” operates. In this regard, the objective of this essay is to analyze how paratranslation, from the Vigo School, can be understood as a space of resistance against a process of reification of the other’s existence in the act of translating. In the “AI era”, where translation has become an increasingly mechanized act, the examination of the paratexts surrounding this process serves as a way to return to the fundamental condition of translation: the human condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ética y Cine Journal is the property of Etica y Cine Journal 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.)

This essay argues that the supermarket partakes in the reification of the nuclear family form. The supermarket is a ubiquitous food space, shaping subjectivity through the ordinary aspects of everyday life. The ubiquity of this space obscures the historical nature of the nuclear family, presenting it instead as the natural and necessary structure of kin relations. I begin with a discussion of Georg Lukács’ account of reification, examining the ways reification thus theorized reveals the reifying force of the supermarket. I then make an intervention into Lukács’ notion of reification, attending to the ways domestic labor, procreation, the production of labor power, and the home as the center of consumption support the reification of the nuclear family both in and outside of the supermarket. In conclusion, this analysis points to the connections between the supermarket, the nuclear family form, and the production of climate chaos to argue that reconfigurations of family and food relations are necessary in the face of ongoing and proliferating climate-related crises.

Often we unconsciously take for granted that there is not really an alternative to how we currently organize society – we tend to reify existing social order, misperceiving the way things are now as the way things must be. Such reification constrains our agency by discouraging the thought that we could do better. Alternative organizations undermine this reification by manifesting the real possibility of organizing differently. Such dereification is valuable in itself insofar as it lifts constraints on agency, facilitating intentional choice regarding the social systems we (re)produce. A case study of this dereification is offered by the Réseau Alimentaire Local (RAL), a network of French 'solidarity groceries' unified by the pursuit of more just and sustainable alternatives to the dominant model. Groups within the RAL develop their own software to manage these novel alternatives. We were struck, however, by some groups' efforts to reify their own solutions, disparaging other approaches as mere attempts to 'reinvent the wheel'. The case thus raised a tricky question: can alternative organizations dereify existing social order without at the same time reifying their proposal, thereby reimposing constraints on agency? Our exploration through the RAL case grounds two contributions. First, conceptualizing reification in terms of materializing abstract ideas, we demonstrate how any given organizational configuration contributes to the materialization of multiple ideas simultaneously. We identify two forms of such multiplicity: vertical multiplicity, where nested relational networks materialize coherent ideas that differ only in their degree of specificity; and horizontal multiplicity, where intersecting relational networks materialize divergent ideas of the same degree of specificity. We argue that failure to recognize this multiplicity accounts for a great deal of materiality's reifying capacity, while its recognition can facilitate new ways of approaching the dereification challenge. Our second contribution is therefore a strategy for resisting reification: materializing multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neuroscience of creativity is built on a tacit and near universal assumption that is false. Paradoxically, this is not contentious; once made explicit, the assumption is readily conceded as false. Psychology regards creativity as made up of many complex, multifaceted, and varied cognitive and emotional processes deployed across many different domains. But we instead think of, and treat, creativity as if it were a single, separate, cohesive, and discrete thing--as in, Einstein had it. In a straightforward extension of this fallacy, cognitive neuroscientists have looked for uniquely creative cognition that (1) is distinct from all other kinds of cognition and (2) has a proprietary neural substrate. In other words, a standalone and monolithic creativity faculty in the brain that manages only creativity and all creativity. First, this paper brings into sharp focus the nature and ubiquity of this fallacy. It then outlines the alternative theoretical position that is (1) based on fundamental neural principles and (2) predicated on taking seriously the concept of creativity as complex and diverse. Like morality or secretiveness, it holds that creativity does not exist as its own, specialized entity in the brain. Instead, its neurocognitive mechanisms are distributed, embedded, and varied; that is, creativity is everywhere and multiply realizable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors should be congratulated for writing about 'critical religion'. Whatever else critical religion might or might not be, nothing could be more important than a critical inquiry into the categories that powerfully organise our knowledge and our institutions, including our universities. By publishing in a major journal, the JAAR, they bring into the mainstream significant topics that are habitually marginalised. They raise many valid points for public debate. Their article, however, is marred by reification and contradiction. To squeeze their generalisations into one journal article, the authors set up Russell McCutcheon, Craig Martin and Timothy Fitzgerald as the core of an imaginary school, and then when they stumble on a possible disagreement between us, they accuse us of inconsistency. Speaking for myself, I explain why I have habitually used the term 'critical religion' to refer to my own work, and why I have recently considered abandoning it. I point out that the authors never properly discuss the genesis of the discourse on the non-religious secular, which is fundamental to any serious attempt to understand 'critical religion'. They ignore my work on India and Japan. They nowhere discuss a central core of my own position, that religion is a member of a configuration of empty categories, including politics, nature, economy, and nation, a signalling system that is the source of hegemonic power and the illusions of enlightenment modernity. However, these shortcomings should not deter us from taking forward their work as a positive opportunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contemplates repression as a factor of production in Anti-Oedipus. Repression is part of the division of labour which defines the composition of the labour–capital relation, what Deleuze and Guattari conceive of as a differential relation. In interpreting Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of repression, commentaries have elaborated on the influences of Marx's theories of reification and of the state. However, the influence of Marx's theory of division of labour in capitalism has not been fully examined. This theory, which involves dispossession of intellectual potentialities and suppression of productive drives, is essential to Deleuze and Guattari's Spinozist hypothesis that the masses came to desire fascism under a particular set of historical conditions. Through a reading of Capital, guided by Balibar's reading in particular, and an analysis of schizophrenia in alignment with Foucault's, Deleuze and Guattari develop a theory of repression as immanent to production. Based in this theory, they conceive of fascism as a line of flight from the limits of capital, emerging among several counteracting factors against the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. In assessing how repression operates in Deleuze and Guattari's form of psychoanalysis, this paper references Marx's Capital and Spinoza's Ethics as well as Balibar's contribution to the 1965 book Reading Capital and Foucault's 1962 Mental Illness and Psychology. The paper concludes with remarks on the further development of this theory in Deleuze and Guattari's 1980 A Thousand Plateaus and Deleuze's 1990 'Postscript on Control Societies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we argue that contemporary parenting ideals are characterised by labour-intensive introspective emotional work akin to the techniques used by psychological coaches. We situate these ideals of contemporary parenting in an emotionalized culture that focuses on the production of happy, thriving children that is simultaneously linked to the production of moral subjectivities. We analyse examples from contemporary Danish parenting literature and explore how these ideals of parenting promises both wellbeing and future life success of children. However, we argue that the ideal of parents as psychological coaches exacerbates the demands of emotional labour on parents, consolidates the individualized responsibilisation of parents for the future success of their children, creates a reification of the self and overlooks ethical and existential questions rooted in pedagogical approaches to upbringing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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What can we learn from a Marxist history and philosophy of science? There are at least three crucial lessons that scholars should seriously reassess. First, the idea that there is a constitutive relation between practice and theory in knowledge production. This was a central concern for many Marxist HPS scholars and led them to conceive "science" as a praxis and as a situated, and not exclusively intellectual, enterprise. Second, the idea that there is a thread connecting social relations, technologies, and scientific abstractions. Modes of thinking and understanding are related to particular social formations. And third, the idea that modern science is both a cause and product of capitalist modes of production, which expanded globally and generated all sorts of inequalities and polarizations. Altogether, these lessons put forward a coherent perspective addressing the socioeconomic nature of scientific knowledge, which is still relevant today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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One amongst many of the defining characteristics of so-called ‘late stage’ capitalism are human-animal relationships that have become acrimonious, hostile, or even monstrous in nature. A foundational premise of monster theory, and one that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seminal 1996 edited collection of the same name suggests, is that the construction of the monster in popular culture is fraught with the boundaries that constitute the society that has spawned them; the monstrous body “exists only to be read” (p. 4). Bringing together the theoretical insights of the Marxist theory of reification, critical animal studies, and monster theory, this article examines the ways in which cinematic depictions of gigantic monstrosity can inform our theorizing of multispecies relationships under capitalism. Specifically, I explore how the tensions between capital and human-animal relationships serve to construct and constitute the multiform monster, Jean Jacket, in Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope. Through an examination of the multispecies relationalities that the film portrays, I argue that the figure of Jean Jacket is a monstrous culmination of the reified and therefore, necessarily deferred nature of human-animal relationships under capital. However, Nope’s conclusion alerts us to the radical dereifying potential of multispecies bonds of care and embodied knowledge; systems of resistance that can be forged even within our current capitalist ruins.

Objectives: The purpose of this systematic review was to examine how the scientific community in Europe that is involved with research with animals perceives and experiences the implementation of 3R (Replace, Reduce, Refine). Methods: A systematic search of the literature published in the past ten years was performed in PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus. Publications were screened for eligibility using a priori inclusion criteria, and only empirical evidence (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methodologies) was retained. Quantitative survey items were investigated by conducting a meta-analysis, and the qualitative data was summarized using an inductive meta-synthetic approach. Included publications were assessed using the Quality Assessment for Diverse Studies tool. Results: 17 publications were included (eight quantitative, seven qualitative, two mixed-methods). The meta-analysis revealed that scientists are skeptical about achieving replacement, even if they believe that 3R improve the quality of experimental results. They are optimistic concerning the impact of 3R on research costs and innovation, and see education as highly valuable for the implementation of 3R. The meta-synthesis revealed four barriers (systemic dynamics, reification process, practical issues, insufficient knowledge) and four facilitators (efficient use of animals, caring for animals, regulatory uptake, supportive workplace environment). Conclusion: These findings show actionable levers at the local and systemic levels, and may inform regulators and institutions in their 3R policies. Trial registration: The protocol was registered into the PROSPERO database under the number CRD42023395769. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seemingly ubiquitous tendency of caregivers to speak to infants in special ways has captivated the interest of scholars across diverse disciplines for over a century. As a result, this phenomenon has been characterized in quite different ways. Here, we highlight the shift from early definitions of "baby-talk" which implied that the nature of speech directed towards infants would vary in different sociolinguistic contexts, to later terms such as "motherese" or "infant-directed speech" (IDS) which came to refer to a specific set of features, some of which were argued to represent a universal, optimal and culturally invariant form of speech. These divergent conceptualizations of IDS thus reflect broader disciplinary tensions pertaining to the role allotted to cultural processes in psychological research. We hope to contribute to this literature by pointing to the complexity associated with identifying discrete categories of speech (i.e., baby-talk and motherese/IDS) within a complex multi-dimensional sociolinguistic landscape. We also highlight ways in which a lack of attention to the cultural context of infant-caregiver interactions may have led to biased characterizations of IDS. Furthermore, these biases may implicitly penetrate the nature of empirical work on IDS as well. We end with a series of suggestions for future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]