Introduction: Relational Understandings in the Archaeology of Ancient Maya Childhood

This article examines the society/nature distinction within sociological and anthropological discourse, particularly concerning Luhmann’s social systems theory. The increasing urgency surrounding climate change and the complexities of the Anthropocene has necessitated reconsidering this dichotomy, often seen as reinforcing sociocentrism. Social systems theory’s emphasis on the system/environment distinction has overlooked the importance of the environment, relegating it to a mere backdrop for societal functioning. By engaging with three critical perspectives – Ontological Relativism, Transcendent Connectionism, and Circular Cosmologism – we emphasize both the contributions and shortcomings of social systems theory in this regard. We then propose a synthesis of these insights through a systemic enactive approach, suggesting that its theoretical framework can enhance our understanding of the society/nature distinction within social systems theory. Ultimately, this article aims to open new research avenues that address the intricate relationship between social systems and their natural environments.

The relational sociology of childhood often has a structural character; however, the main problem is that the structural character largely confines the “ontological turn” in childhood studies. This is related to the fact that how structures are understood in relational analysis is mostly based on a one-way perspective: Structures are “systems of human relations between social positions”. In this context, this article problematizes the structural character of relational childhood ontology. In order to overcome the problem, we should trace alternative relational conceptualizations and show how we can work them in relational childhood sociology. Based on the processual character in hybrid-relational childhood ontology, this article argues which features of Elias and Dépelteau’s relational ontologies can be included in the relational ontology of childhood in order to strengthen the understanding of interdependence relations at the interactional level. The aim of the article is to make a theoretical contribution to the strengthening of the processual character in the relational analysis of childhood by drawing attention to the need for processual-relational childhood ontology as an alternative to the structural-relational perspective. Looking at children’s agency from a processual-relational perspective will further reveal the potential and capacity of children to transform their social worlds and social fields.

This paper proposes a relational and critical sociological perspective on discourse analysis, in particular on so-called “Critical Discourse Analysis” (CDA). The main argument of this paper is that CDA has not yet been able to turn its critical perspective towards its own field. Meanwhile, neither CDA nor other schools of discourse analysis can still pretend not to be integral parts of the system legitimizing social hierarchies in modern societies. The paper argues that discourse analysis can be seen as highly dependent on power relations, both because of its institutional positioning and because of its restricted reflexivity. A call for the development of a critical sociology of discourse analysis based on a relational approach is therefore presented. Its draft programme is largely based on inspiration from the sociology of knowledge, in particular from “the sociology of sociology” of Pierre Bourdieu.

1. Introduction: Epistemology, Experiments and Economics Part I The Social Epistemology of Experiment 2. Creating Phenomena in the Lab 3. Creating Microeconomic Phenomena 4. Intervening in the 'Material World' 5. Intervening in the 'Social World' 6. The Social Epistemology of Experiment Part II The Social Epistemology of Experimental Economics 7. The Foundation of Experimental Economics 8. Early Methodological Debate in Experimental Economics 9. Economics Experiments and the Real World 10. Human Agency (or lack thereof) in Economics Experiments 11. Behavioural Experiments: How Economists Learn about Human Behaviour 12. Preference Reversals and Critical Practice in Economics 13. Conclusion: What about the Social Epistemology of Experiment?

Creating "Kantri" in Central New Guinea: Relational Ontology and the Categorical Logic of Statecraft

This chapter places the work in the context of two major bodies of literature: studies of materiality since the 1980s, and the literature of the Spanish conquest and colonialism in Mexico. It provides a critique of studies of materiality that argue that scholars must focus more on the material world and less on the social world. Now that the literature on Spanish colonialism has only begun emphasizing Indigenous power in the last several decades, the chapter argues that it is no time to focus on things and abandon the social world. Instead, it argues that we must continue the project of studying how different groups of people, in competition and collaboration, created and transformed the material world. The chapter also provides a critique of the use of agency as a concept that guides work on materiality.

Human intentionality forms just one aspect in understanding the tourist’s engagement with food, and yet tends to dominate food tourism research; whilst food itself tends to remain somewhat ‘passive stuff’. A focus on the active presence of food we argue is rare in food tourism scholarship. This paper thus explores how tourist scholars offering insights into the practices and experiences of eating in tourism contexts have taken to spatial and relational approaches to explore what it means to eat during travel. We argue that tourist studies literature on food holds the potential to unlock the complexity of what tourists eat, and why. We do this by discussing two broad ‘spatial turns’ relating to tourism geographies of eating as relational. In doing this we attend to questions of how things become food through attunement to sociospatial-material relationships, experiences and situated practices. We show how these two relational approaches offer exciting research agendas that rethink food tourism not as a predetermined, structured human experience or touristic agenda – but as something that is ongoing, and made through individuals’ sensorial engagement with the social and material world.

Contemporary African theology continues to wrestle with the challenge of expressing the doctrine of the Trinity in ways that are theologically faithful and culturally resonant. While Western Trinitarian formulations have been shared by metaphysical and epistemological paradigms, they often fail to account for the African relational and Communal worldview. Although rooted in orthodox Trinitarian confession, African Christianity lacks a contextual theological framework that meaningfully integrates its socio-spiritual realities. Through a Historical Retrieval and Reappropriation Methodology, this article examines the implications of Edward’s 18th-century metaphysical framework and Barth’s 20th-century revelatory approach for contemporary theology. Edwards' relational ontology, grounded in love and articulated through the Spirit as the bond between the Father and Son, aligns with the African conception of Communal identity and personhood. In contrast, Barth’s revelatory epistemology offers methodological clarity, emphasizing divine self-revelation as a safeguard against syncretism. This study situates Edwards and Barth in a conversation within an African context, offering a relational and revelation-based approach to Trinitarian theology that affirms the interconnectedness of divine life and human community. This article contributes to ongoing Trinitarian discourse by advancing a contextual theological framework that bridges Western doctrinal traditions and African epistemologies, aiming to shape orthodox and socially transformative theology.

Contemporary African theology continues to wrestle with the challenge of expressing the doctrine of the Trinity in ways that are theologically faithful and culturally resonant. While Western Trinitarian formulations have been shared by metaphysical and epistemological paradigms, they often fail to account for the African relational and Communal worldview. Although rooted in orthodox Trinitarian confession, African Christianity lacks a contextual theological framework that meaningfully integrates its socio-spiritual realities. Through a Historical Retrieval and Reappropriation Methodology, this article examines the implications of Edward’s 18th-century metaphysical framework and Barth’s 20th-century revelatory approach for contemporary theology. Edwards' relational ontology, grounded in love and articulated through the Spirit as the bond between the Father and Son, aligns with the African conception of Communal identity and personhood. In contrast, Barth’s revelatory epistemology offers methodological clarity, emphasizing divine self-revelation as a safeguard against syncretism. This study situates Edwards and Barth in a conversation within an African context, offering a relational and revelation-based approach to Trinitarian theology that affirms the interconnectedness of divine life and human community. This article contributes to ongoing Trinitarian discourse by advancing a contextual theological framework that bridges Western doctrinal traditions and African epistemologies, aiming to shape orthodox and socially transformative theology.

Security Studies: Critical Perspectives takes a question-centred approach by introducing the analysis of security from critical and interdisciplinary perspectives. It provides a set of analytic steps so that readers develop the critical thinking skills and confidence to ask important questions about security and our worlds in contemporary politics. Common-sense security assumptions that reproduce forms of oppression and domination are revealed and their justifications decentred while perspectives inclusive of class, gender and sexualities, ethnicity and race, religion, disability, culture and ideology, political belonging, and the global south are introduced. In doing so, the chapters in this book combine critical analysis with concrete empirical issues that connect readers to the social and political worlds around them.

Countless authors have deconstructed both the romantic and the troubled history of wildness and wilderness, yet very few researchers have ever asked people: “What does wild mean to you?” In doing so, with our research we aim to understand wildness as a phenomenological and relational entity and aim to make sense of the multiple ways in which personal entanglements with particular places inform contingent and place-based ideas of wildness. Although there are many dimensions to both the experience and the idea of wildness, in this paper we reflect in particular on one: vitality. We draw our data from dozens of interviews held across Canada and base our interpretations on a combination of traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge, relational ontologies, and more-than-representational theories.

Since at least the 1960s, responding to changes both in the world and in the Church the project of Catholic university education in the United States and elsewhere has undergone a significant alteration in structure, and subsequently of its own sense of identity, purpose, and mission. Concerns about the integrity of Catholic universities both as Catholic and as university abound and have done for some time. Providing a brief review of some of the existing literature, this paper argues that the contemporary discussion regarding identity and mission for Catholic colleges and universities suffers from a decidedly modern inability to the address first order questions. This failure to properly treat questions pertaining to metaphysics render Catholic institutions of higher learning locked within the superficial plane in terms of how they address their own sense of identity and mission. In response to this, this paper argues that there exists within the Catholic tradition adequate metaphysical richness that can and should more faithfully ground the essence of the Catholic college or university. Drawing on the metaphysical work of such figures as David L. Schindler and others, the author argues that a relational ontology, characterized by an understanding of the metaphysics of gift can not only save the project of Catholic university education but is in fact central to its mission.

The pedagogical challenges in preparing child and youth care (CYC) students for 21st century CYC practice, global citizenship, and life cannot be rightfully addressed by an antiquated higher education system predicated on a Newtonian/Cartesian ontology that assumes a mechanistic view of the materialistic world and a solitary view of the “self” as completely autonomous, ego-based, and self-enclosed. In this article, we propose an alternative ontological stance for teaching and learning in higher education, one that is informed by the growing body of relational ontology scholarship in theology, philosophy, psychology, nursing, political theory, educational theory, and even information science. The basic contention of a relational ontology is that all relations between entities are ontologically more fundamental than the entities themselves. Within this perspective, the “self” is not so much a personal possession as it is a process of relatedness and a reflection of one’s relational experiences. This view of the self has enormous implications for teaching and learning. A relational ontological approach to education will employ more holistic, collaborative, and experiential methods of teaching and learning in which the learner’s (i.e., the self’s) mind, body, emotions, spirit, and environment are all considered essential components of the learning process. The conversation presented in this article is an invitation to rethink the ontological foundations upon which CYC education is currently constructed and to explore the potential of an ontological revolution in CYC teaching and learning pedagogy. In CYC, as in other disciplines, it is the visionaries operating at the edges of the discipline’s philosophical, theoretical, and practice boundaries who provide the critical reflection and creativity of thought to nudge the field forward. Please join us in this adventure.

Critical perspectives on embodiment in organizations acknowledges that the body is a site, object and subject of the labor force, crossing and spanning the material, social, cultural, and natural world (Dale, 2005; Monaghan, 2002; Williams & Bendelow, 1998). Binary distinctions between body and mind are challenged (Pullen & Knights, 2007), placing the lived experience as locus of analysis (Kringen & Novich, 2018; Williams & Bendelow, 1998). Importantly, examining people's lived experiences allow us to explain and understand inequalities and freedoms, as these are lived through and bounded by bodies, both within and outside the organization (Fotaki & Pullen, 2019). Elaborating on this point, Kringen and Novich (2018, pp. 198–199) note:

The main recommendations of the panel report can be summarised under five key headings:  HUMANITY The Panel recommends recognition that research in this field should be geared towards the development of critical understandings of self and society in the modern world. Archaeological research into the modern past should be ambitious in seeking to contribute to understanding of the major social, economic and environmental developments through which the modern world came into being. Modern-world archaeology can add significantly to knowledge of Scotland’s historical relationships with the rest of the British Isles, Europe and the wider world. Archaeology offers a new perspective on what it has meant to be a modern person and a member of modern society, inhabiting a modern world.  MATERIALITY The Panel recommends approaches to research which focus on the materiality of the recent past (i.e. the character of relationships between people and their material world). Archaeology’s contribution to understandings of the modern world lies in its ability to situate, humanise and contextualise broader historical developments. Archaeological research can provide new insights into the modern past by investigating historical trends not as abstract phenomena but as changes to real lives, affecting different localities in different ways. Archaeology can take a long-term perspective on major modern developments, researching their ‘prehistory’ (which often extends back into the Middle Ages) and their material legacy in the present. Archaeology can humanise and contextualise long-term processes and global connections by working outwards from individual life stories, developing biographies of individual artefacts and buildings and evidencing the reciprocity of people, things, places and landscapes. The modern person and modern social relationships were formed in and through material environments and, to understand modern humanity, it is crucial that we understand humanity’s material relationships in the modern world.  PERSPECTIVE The Panel recommends the development, realisation and promotion of work which takes a critical perspective on the present from a deeper understanding of the recent past. Research into the modern past provides a critical perspective on the present, uncovering the origins of our current ways of life and of relating to each other and to the world around us. It is important that this relevance is acknowledged, understood, developed and mobilised to connect past, present and future. The material approach of archaeology can enhance understanding, challenge assumptions and develop new and alternative histories. Modern Scotland: Archaeology, the Modern past and the Modern present vi Archaeology can evidence varied experience of social, environmental and economic change in the past. It can consider questions of local distinctiveness and global homogeneity in complex and nuanced ways. It can reveal the hidden histories of those whose ways of life diverged from the historical mainstream. Archaeology can challenge simplistic, essentialist understandings of the recent Scottish past, providing insights into the historical character and interaction of Scottish, British and other identities and ideologies.  COLLABORATION The Panel recommends the development of integrated and collaborative research practices. Perhaps above all other periods of the past, the modern past is a field of enquiry where there is great potential benefit in collaboration between different specialist sectors within archaeology, between different disciplines, between Scottish-based researchers and researchers elsewhere in the world and between professionals and the public. The Panel advocates the development of new ways of working involving integrated and collaborative investigation of the modern past. Extending beyond previous modes of inter-disciplinary practice, these new approaches should involve active engagement between different interests developing collaborative responses to common questions and problems.  REFLECTION The Panel recommends that a reflexive approach is taken to the archaeology of the modern past, requiring research into the nature of academic, professional and public engagements with the modern past and the development of new reflexive modes of practice. Archaeology investigates the past but it does so from its position in the present. Research should develop a greater understanding of modern-period archaeology as a scholarly pursuit and social practice in the present. Research should provide insights into the ways in which the modern past is presented and represented in particular contexts. Work is required to better evidence popular understandings of and engagements with the modern past and to understand the politics of the recent past, particularly its material aspect. Research should seek to advance knowledge and understanding of the moral and ethical viewpoints held by professionals and members of the public in relation to the archaeology of the recent past. There is a need to critically review public engagement practices in modern-world archaeology and develop new modes of public-professional collaboration and to generate practices through which archaeology can make positive interventions in the world. And there is a need to embed processes of ethical reflection and beneficial action into archaeological practice relating to the modern past.