Critical Sociology Research Articles

The Social and Sociological Province of Climate Change: Introduction

AbstractDespite its importance and prominence in public debates, including in many social science-related disciplines such as political science, anthropology, geography, and history, climate change has been unevenly addressed within critical sociology. In the tradition of critical theories, a critical sociology approach could contribute to climate science by discussing, for instance, what it means for societies and individuals to live together in times of ecological crisis and how this interplays with other crises and challenges of our time. As we face various transformations caused by climate change, sociology can inquire about social relations in the Anthropocene, including the critique of this concept and its alternatives, such as Capitalocene. This introductory article explores the intersection of sociology and the climate crisis, examining the sociological significance of the latter. It also discusses the importance for sociology, at both theoretical and empirical levels, to climate-related debates. It highlights the need for pluralistic approaches that can contribute to framing and addressing climate change, encompassing diagnosis, alternatives, science, and politics. The papers in this special issue seek to engage with and contribute to the abovementioned debate by covering theoretical and empirical perspectives on climate crisis, drawing attention to themes such as the relationship between critical theory and climate change, theories of modernity, the notion of (post)sustainability, just transitions, the role of media systems in fostering sustainable transformations, and the contribution of social movements to socioecological transformation, with a particular focus on the 'Global South'.

The Presence of Biopower in Keiko Furukura from Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman”

The collected written and oral works of a society portraying values and beliefs as well as their challenges are referred to as literature. In terms of age and volume, Japanese literature is comparable to Western literature. Sayaka Murata, a prominent Japanese author, critiques conventions, exemplified by her 2016 novella "Convenience Store Woman," shaping the identity of a 21st-century woman. Keiko, Murata’s heroine, works in a convenience store and lives through the question of absolute autonomy. This study investigates the presence of Biopower in Keiko Furukura from Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman.” Specifically, it looks into character, settings, and themes. This study uses a qualitative method, specifically Discourse Analysis. The theories that support this study are Michel Foucault’s Theory of Biopower and Sociological Literary Criticism by Kenneth Burke. The results of this study reveal that Anatomopolitics and Biopolitics are the forms of Biopower present in the character. In the settings, both Anatamopolitics and Biopolitics are also exhibited. Similarly, Anatomopolitics and Biopolitics are the forms of Biopower found in the themes. Based on the findings, this study concludes that Biopower is present in Keiko Furukura from Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman.” From the study’s conclusion, the following are recommended: The Death of Individualism: A Character Analysis of William Stoner from John William’s “Stoner,” Construction of Identity: A Sociological Critique of Natsuko Imamura’s “The Woman in the Purple Skirt,” Challenging Gender Norms: An Examination of Gender Norms in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Challenging the Contemporary Feminism of Kojima in “Heaven” by Meiko Kawakami.

The Methodology of Sociological Criticism in Iraq

In the period preceding the establishment of the first sociology department at the University of Baghdad, the works of Abdul Fattah Ibrahim and Abdul Jabbar Arim played a significant role. These scholars are regarded as pioneers of this pre-foundational phase. Although they did not conduct any field research, the methodologies they advocated for analysing and critiquing Iraqi social reality were well-defined. In Abdul Fattah Ibrahim's first specialised book on sociology, he presents Darwin's theory of evolution as "the foundational principle upon which modern sociology is based." He defines sociology as "the study of society in its evolution according to the law of the survival of the fittest, with the goal of enhancing its ability to endure."

Thinking Musically

Despite abundant scholarship on Theodor W. Adorno’s theoretical writings, his musical compositions have been largely overlooked. This article uses the example of his 1944 song cycle Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George to argue that Adorno’s music stands in dialectical relation to his philosophy. The German symbolist poet Stefan George is given pride of place not only in Adorno’s compositions but also in his writings: he returned to George as a subject four times over the course of three decades. It is argued here that Adorno brought two seminal aspects of his work together musically decades before he rendered them in prose, placing George at their intersection: his theory of the relationship between music and language, and his theory of the lyric. Answering Adorno’s call for the listener to become a “compositional partner” in making sense of his music, I use his own methods of interpretation to examine how music serves as an alternative means of cognition to philosophical. I begin with an immanent analysis, examining the structure of each song and its relationship to the cycle as a whole without recourse to Adorno’s philosophy. I then outline his theoretical explanation of both music and lyric before reinterpreting the cycle in light of the dialectic between subject and object that he discusses. Finally, I propose that the sociological critique that Adorno did not fix in prose arises from the interplay between music and language within the 1944 cycle, giving voice to the social context from which it arose.

Reaching the unreachable through action research? Thomas Mathiesen and the Nordic socio-legal tradition

Thomas Mathiesen has been a source of inspiration for research in critical sociology, criminology, and the sociology of law for many decades. Mathiesen’s impact extends far beyond the academic realm, as his action research lives on. This intervention discusses the ongoing influence of Mathiesen’s action research approach, which integrates research, education, and societal impact. This is illustrated through an action research project we conducted in Denmark’s largest marginalised living area, where over 1,000 public housing units are being demolished, affecting approximately 2,500 residents. In the project, we experimented with different outreach legal aid approaches, considering our own positionalities, to gain knowledge about how to establish a legal aid infrastructure that could reach the unreachable. An ethical dilemma we faced was how we could engage with the people without inadvertently naming issues, particularly legal problems, of which they might not be aware. If the residents were unaware of these issues or did not consider them important, could we then inadvertently create and juridify new problems for them? Moreover, this intervention discusses how, in alignment with Mathiesen, we combined legal aid with legal clinical education, that is, training law students to become legal aid workers. We conclude that Mathiesen’s approach remains relevant, and by integrating his action research with decolonial thoughts, new insights may emerge to reach the seemingly unreachable.

Bridges for Transgression: How Community Engagement Strengthened My Conocimiento

This article is an expansion of the Feminist Lecture that I gave at the Sociologists for Women in Society Meetings in April 2021. I map my journey toward conocimiento, highlighting the centrality of my volunteer work with asylum seekers, traveling to their sponsors after being released from ICE detention, for the development of my identity as a scholar activist. I rely on two theories, intersectionality and spiritual activism—both developed by women of color scholars to guide our efforts toward social change—to illustrate how scholars can reconcile their roles as community activists with their roles as scholars in academia. I bring intersectionality and spiritual activism together, as distinct (albeit complementary) resistant knowledge projects that, in tandem, support my critique of sociology’s competing commitments to objective empirical research and social justice. I chronicle how strengthening my conocimiento has served as a tool in my efforts to transgress the discipline and ultimately how it helped me find a more authentic existence within the academy.

Reconceptualising graduate resilience – an integrated multi-level framework for future research

This paper draws on Bourdieusian social theory to reconceptualise graduate resilience in post-industrial societies to provide a fresh perspective on a concept that has gained increasing prominence in recent years. Through a review of sociological critiques of resilience, this paper argues that graduate resilience is a complex social phenomenon shaped by a range of factors, including material and social resources. In response, we propose an integrated multi-level framework that identifies different stages of graduate resilience, in the context of early transitions into the labour market, and how these stages are shaped at the micro, meso, and macro levels. This framework places resilience in the context of neo-liberalism and highlights structural barriers that hinder the building and signalling of graduate resilience. We argue that the framework enables current representations and understandings of graduate resilience within research, policy, and practice to be problematised and provides a critical starting point for advancing understanding.

Enforced freedoms: Testing art students’ artistic engagements in a folk high school

Drawing on convention theory and sociology of critique, this article examines how teachers at a Swedish folk high school coordinate students’ activities through tests. Through ethnographic descriptions of exercises, assignments, presentations, and exhibitions that test students’ engagement, it is shown how the teachers seek to depart from the standardized assessment procedure associated with formalized schooling. More specifically, the teachers’ tests destabilize the prevailing understanding of what art “is,” support the students to collectively explore and experiment with materials and highlight promising dimensions in their art-making. The article highlights “what is at stake” in art education and recognizes certain conventions as central in formatting, confirming, and interrogating the students’ understanding of their artistic practices. Through these tests, students face a contradiction of freedom: the freedom to find their unique voice and follow their inner calling, versus the explicit and imposed expectation to express their freedom in a certain way.

(Re-)Vitalizing the Concept of Organization: Inspirations From Recent Social Theory

In this essay, we introduce recent debates on both concepts of organization and organization’s future. Since Max Weber’s ideas gained acceptance, there has been a strong link between social theory (rationalized modernity) and a concept of organization (bureaucracy) in organization theory as well as organizational sociology. Today, organizational scholarship challenges, but at the same time defends, this classical link. We argue that both positions can be substantiated empirically. This situation motivates a debate on updating and revitalizing the link between organizational concepts and social theories that we aim to put forward with this special issue of Critical Sociology. We discuss the assembled contributions in relation to this fundamental conceptual debate of organization research and conclude that the richness of social theories can still serve as an inspiration to explain recent organizational phenomena.

Transformative learning about anxiety: A duo‐ethnography of Chinese female immigrants

AbstractExisting studies predominantly analyze the mental health experiences of Chinese international students through a psychological perspective. This study, however, delves into transformative learning (TL) outcomes related to understanding and overcoming “anxiety” from a critical sociological lens. Utilizing a duo‐ethnographic methodology, it sheds light on the transformative learning experiences of three female Chinese researchers as they investigate anxiety in a North American higher education setting. This study uncovers socio‐cultural factors contributing to anxiety among Chinese international students abroad, with a particular emphasis on faculty's racialized habitus, academic struggles, emotions, and gender. It represents an interdisciplinary fusion between critical sociology and adult education, specifically concentrating on TL for social justice and the emotional and relational aspects of TL.

Sociology beyond suspicion: Goldfarb as post-critical critic

ABSTRACT This paper argues that sociology has come to be dominated by an ethos of suspicion and that attending to the critical sociology of Jeffrey C. Goldfarb can help it break free from this domination and expand the range of its relation to the structures, institutions, and interactions it studies. This argument unfolds in three parts. In the first it is argued that, while critique remains essential, the ethos of suspicion has unnecessarily narrowed its scope. The space for a more capacious understanding of critique is made, secondly, through a rereading of two recent ‘critics of critique’: Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour. Third and finally, this paper shows how Goldfarb’s scholarship steps into the space carved out by these criticisms, providing a model of a sociology that has moved ‘beyond suspicion’ in its attention to the liberatory power that lies in the collective, critical capacity of ordinary, everyday actors.

Critical Religion and the Sociology of Religion

Abstract This article discusses the relevance of Critical Religion to the sociology of religion. Critical Religion argues that the category of “religion” is a Western concept that through colonialism and imperialism has been superimposed over non-Western societies. In contrast, it offers a critical theory of or critical sociology of religion, which evaluates the positive and negatives aspects of what we call religion. The article provides a summary of key proponents of critical religion then uses it to discuss the secularization debate which runs through the classics and the old and new paradigms in the sociology of religion. It discusses the lived religion methodology and problematizes that through its lack of distinction between the religious and the secular, it overemphasizes the role of religion. Finally, the article offers a more scientific and neutral redefinition of the category of religion as a solution to the problems with the category raised by critical religion.

Back to the Future: Placing the Florida Decision in Historical Context

In January 2024, Florida’s Board of Education eliminated the sociology course, ‘Principles of Sociology’ as one of its core requirements for obtaining a general social science education in its college and university system. Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz, led the charge, claiming that sociology has been ‘hijacked by left wing activists’ and is a purveyor of ‘woke ideology’. Some within the profession would agree with Diaz, and certainly, many university administrators would as well. Of course, there are varying representations of sociology, and what Diaz and others are targeting is critical sociology and its commitment to the interrogation of power. However, these political dynamics are not new. The history of critical sociology has reflected a similar pattern that it is being played out currently. The ebbs and flows of critical sociology’s place within the discipline, the state and profession’s suppression of it, its resurgence linked to external social and political forces, and its precarious existence within the university have been true of critical sociology since its origins. This paper offers a historical context for better understanding the current attack on the field of sociology and raises the question, what should critical sociologists do about it?

Křivda a odpor : konstrukce alternativní modernity a mobilizace amerických konzervativních věřících

This article explores much debated contemporary development in the contestation of the dominant, liberal interpretation of modernity by conservative Christians in the United States through counter hegemonic discourse that is deployed in the political arena and facilitates broader cultural struggle. The examination combines the analysis of discourse from the extensive corpus of data produced by five elite actors in the American religious and political milieu and its interplay with the socioeconomic factors of their constituency on the one hand and the institutional and historical context of accounts. Following in the footsteps of critical sociology of religion, emphasis was placed on processes through which the actors establish a claim for power and legitimize the application of moral rationality as the different path to modern society. Employment of discursive instruments in form of myths, narratives, and negative representations tied to specific religious language, is not only showing the permeability of the church-state separation in supposedly secular political arrangements. More importantly, it is unrevealing the authoritative, mobilizational power of the religious matrix of emotionally motivating meanings and identity-making narratives in face of shortcomings and crises of the hegemonic socio-political constellation. In this manner, it serves as a tool to challenge established interpretations of commitments to freedom and equality, or in many instances reinterprets them to legitimize policy entailed in the notion of collective morality. However, this considerable engagement also creates points of contention in society and in religious formations, which leads to their fragmentation between different interpretations of such commitments.

Reconstructing Burawoy: Theorizing Migrant Labor, the Politics of Precarity, and Postcolonial/Racial Transformations

Michael Burawoy’s writings lay a foundation for critical sociologies of immigration, social movements, race, and postcolonial society. To realize these promises, however, it will be necessary to reconstruct Burawoy, as he has done with the theories of so many others. In this piece, I trace my own engagements with Burawoy in three areas: migrant labor, the politics of economic precarity, and postcolonial and racial transformations. For each area, I show how Burawoy laid a foundation for subsequent analysis, which I sought to take forward in my own work. These reconstructions reveal just how valuable Burawoy’s theories are to the advancement of critical sociology.

The “Spirit” of New Atheism and Religious Activism in the Post-9/11 God Debate

AbstractIn this article I examine the contemporary discourses and debates that surround the sociology of spirituality, with especial attention to the term “spirituality”. To counter the widespread belief that this term lacks clarity and utility, I suggest reconsidering Max Weber’s use of the term “spirit,” as it refers to a recognisable ethic that results in specific behaviour, while still retaining its religious and spiritual connotations. Through focusing on two influential English figures in the post 9/11 God debate in the West, Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong, I provide a brief case study of how Weber’s understanding of “spirit” serves great utility in illuminating what drives the ideas, identity-making and behaviour of contemporary atheists and those defending religion. By utilising Weber’s “spirit,” rather than the term spirituality, I demonstrate that this enables us to dig deep into the social context and backgrounds of these two individuals, and to avoid taking their statements at face value – a common criticism of sociology of spirituality studies. I argue that the use of “spirit,” in terms of a recognisable ethic that results in specific behaviour, would benefit the sociology of spirituality. This is because it grounds the God debaters’ ideas and beliefs in a recognisable human experience that eludes reductive distinctions and disembodied abstractions.

Precarietà e classe. Genitori in occupazioni precarie e ‘lotte quotidiane'

This study presents the results of exploratory research on precarity and class. Through key concepts drawn from critical sociology, we try to understand class as class struggle, but not in the political sense of the concept. Here class struggle means the uninterrupted efforts of a whole group of people, within the given circumstances, to create better living conditions. Precarity is part of these circumstances and it is framed within the dynamics of valorisation of labour, which tends to reduce the person to simple labour-power. The participants are parents in pre-carious employment and we want to report and reflect on their efforts to achieve decent living standards. The intent of this study is critical, it does not want to demonstrate whether the "precariat" is a social class or not, but through the narratives of parents in precarious employment about their difficult circumstances, this research wants to explore how daily struggles can be understood as class struggles of people at the margins.

African Vernacular Archives of Senior Women as Foundation Stones of Global Critical Sociology

This article contributes to global sociology through the construction of African sociological vocabularies from Nguni vernacular terms in Southern Africa. We employ Toyin Falola’s concept of “ritual archives” to argue that the social practices of senior African women teach and promote the sociological imagination for a global sociology that moves beyond the confines set by the “founding fathers” of the discipline. We combine the women’s status in the African household with the general understanding of being umntu (person), uluntu (society), and ubuntu (humanity) to argue for a locally informed linguistic terms and vocabularies that could promote inclusive global sociology.

ASSOCIATIVISM AMONG URBAN WASTE PICKERS IN BRAZIL

The article is based on the Sociopoetics methodology and is theoretically supported by Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ critical sociology, especially the sociology of absences and emergencies and the prospect of Epistemologies of the South. It was conducted with recycling cooperatives in the city of Canoas, southern Brazil. The object is the knowledge and social practices produced in contexts of collective life among poor workers who have in the association to collection and treatment of urban recyclables an alternative to improve their living conditions. Knowledge involves perceptions and representations covering identity and sociocultural expressions of these subjects. The research conducted so far shows that precariousness and social disqualification remain in their daily experiences; economic inclusion is limited, and the obtained income is not always enough. There is, however, the ability to produce processes of change in their living conditions by entering in a context of political participation and access to public policies.

Rigid Flesh – Towards the Critique of Technologically Mediated Chiasm

ABSTRACT Technology has been at the centre of existentialist (e.g. Heidegger) and sociological (e.g. Marcuse) critique for a long time. The latest versions of criticism rely on the results of “science and technology studies”: they argue that essentialist conceptualisations of technology should be replaced while aiming at “democratizing technology” (e.g. Feenberg). However, even these approaches are characterised by a shortcoming when it comes to providing a normative basis: as contemporary technology intermeshes with the elementary levels of existence (such as perception or cognition), it remains in the blind spot of those users, who could “democratize” it through their critique. Accordingly, the formal normative bases (e.g. the one provided by Feenberg, who relies on Habermas’ democracy principle), need to be complemented with substantive claims. For this purpose, a phenomenological-existentialist framework is elaborated with the help of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. It is argued that due to the ongoing expansion of social systems relying on various forms of technology (Luhmann), the “mediated flesh” becomes rigid. By losing the plasticity of the chiasm, subjects are exposed to existential crises unmanageable by mere technology (e.g. mental disorders). Such experience of technologically induced social suffering could serve as a normative basis for criticising the over-expansion of technology.