Tradition Of Critical Theory Research Articles

“Without Losing Sight of the Concrete”: Critical and Metacritical Theories of Race

ABSTRACT The shifting dynamics of racial domination across historical contexts present a problem for critical philosophy of race. Much of the literature has focused on answering the question of “What is race?” as the solution to the problem of dynamic variability. In what follows, this article proposes that a better solution should begin with answering the question “What must the world be like for race to shift appearances across contexts?” Answering the latter question recapitulates the classic tension between appearance and reality. A core feature of racial domination is that it abstracts from social relations by presenting them as natural. Drawing on the tradition of critical theory from Karl Marx to Roy Bhaskar, this article argues that the task of critical philosophy of race is primarily explanatory rather than moral. The wrongness of racial domination follows from the critical elucidation of how a given society systemically induces the misrecognition of social conditions and thus blocks the realization of emancipatory agency. By presenting a clearer picture of what the world is like, critical philosophy of race can better aid our capacity for self-emancipation.

The implications of critical theory for adult education policy

The German tradition of critical theory (often called the Frankfurt School), represented by such authors as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Oskar Negt, have given crucial contributions to social and cultural theory in investigating and conceptualizing contradictory conditions of modern Western societies. This paper will discuss the ways in which these critical theorists have approached adult learning and education. Important elements are the role of adult learning in confronting the past and the present of Western societies (Adorno, Horkheimer) and the potential of experience-based learning in supporting open and democratic cultures and communities (Negt). Except for Negt, adult education was a minor topic for these critical theory scholars. Nevertheless, their contributions include important comments on and implications for adult education policy, including questions such as the responsibility of states for education, the democratic character of educational institutions, and the relationship between skills for work and for civil life. Critical theory holds important insights in the societal embedding of adult education and consequences for the objectives. These insights can guide (and have guided) critical research in adult education policy, but they need to be combined with policy analysis concepts and systematic empirical work.

Applying Carspecken’s critical ethnography method to uncover the culture of health disparity in intensive care units

Background & Aim: Carspecken’s critical ethnography method has gained prominence in nursing research, necessitating a fresh perspective on its practicality and advantages. This study aims to provide a unique viewpoint on using critical ethnography as a foundational methodology to uncover health disparity culture in intensive care units.
 Methods & Materials: While emphasizing its review design with original examples, this perspective piece provides a practical explanation of Carspecken’s five-stage critical ethnography approach. Grounded in the ontological and epistemological paradigm, this essay examines critical ethnography as a crucial approach to illuminating the discursive culture surrounding health disparities. Also, this study presents original instances of monological and dialogical data, reconstructive analysis, and findings from a study that was carried out to provide more perspective on implementation. It also mentions how it relates the findings to social factors and sociopolitical theories.
 Results: The study reveals nuanced insights into the practicality and advantages of Carspecken’s method, shedding light on social processes contributing to health disparities in intensive care units. This method allowed us to identify how external powers extend to the intensive care unit, revealing a concealed culture that disrupts service provision balance. It exposed individual, organizational, and systemic roots contributing to disparities. Additionally, it highlighted how individual diversities can lead to disparity.
 Conclusion: This study highlights the significance of Carspecken’s critical ethnography in nursing studies within the critical theory tradition. It is argued that Carspecken’s approach to critical ethnography is particularly instrumental in elucidating the social structures contributing to health disparities.

Critique and its foundations: on critical realism and the Frankfurt School

ABSTRACT In this paper, I assess some recent critical realist constructive criticisms of Theodor Adorno, one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory. I argue that while there are similarities between Adorno’s treatment of causality and the critical realist notion of powers, these connections should not be taken to imply that Adorno’s conception of critique requires a critical realist powers ontology. I show that Bhaskar’s transcendental realism is at odds with the basic commitments of Adorno’s historical materialism. I go on to clarify such materialism and show that to Adorno, capital is the historical compulsion characteristic of modernity.

Advent of the online Neo-subject

Arguably, from a post-Foucauldian perspective, information and communications technology (ICT) offers an arena for ongoing subjectivation aligned with societal or moral guidelines, such as the principles of efficacy and joy, technology-centrism and consumerism. In line with the tradition of critical social theory, the present paper offers a theoretical and a Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)-centred empirical framework based on recent social practices.

Certainty in an Uncertain World: Toward A Critical Theory of Opinion

Terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ circulate freely today within the popular lexicon. It is an environment where objective facts have ‘become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (OED). Central here is to understand the conceptual grounding of subjective opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of social communication. My paper will draw on the Hegelian tradition of critical theory that has in unique ways unified an analysis of the nexus between socio-economic structures and epistemological frameworks. Here I name opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of self-certainty, which receives validation within what Adorno called the Halbbildung of industrial culture, a form of social consciousness cultivated by the spread of information and economic imperative. It will be argued that the concept of opinion becomes a vital question for understanding, in this ‘post-truth’ landscape, current standards of instantaneous communication and cultural transmission.

Resonance as a medio-passive, emancipatory and transformative power: a reply to my critics

This is a response to a critique of my theory in the Journal of Chinese Sociology. In this response, I take the relationship between resonance theory and the tradition of critical theory as the starting point, and discuss the contributions of the five commentators in terms of the focus of resonance theory and its extension to critical theory, the questions and concerns that such an extension may raise, and the overcoming and reflecting on Eurocentrism in resonance theory. Finally, I will conclude with some reflections on their approach.

Critical Academy under Attack

Scholars working within different critical theory traditions are not unfamiliar with the experience of encountering dismissive representations of their work, including from parts of the academy that disavow the politics of academic research and knowledge production. However, the political project of delegitimizing critical research and scholarship seems to be intensifying. Signifiers like “critical theory”, “critical race theory” and “gender theory” have become objects of antagonism and moral panic for a diverse cast of political, cultural and media actors, including self-styled academic dissidents with audiences well beyond the academy. In tandem, critical scholarship faces an increasingly inhospitable ecology within the neoliberal university, even while the latter simultaneously brands itself in the language of social justice. Chaired and introduced by Gavan Titley, the panel contributions from Sahana Udupa, Éric Fassin, and Diana Mulinari reflect on the challenges faced by critical scholars and critical scholarship in a time of emboldened reactionary politics. It asks how these challenges might be intellectually and politically confronted, and countered, in light of the special issue’s reflections on the current condition of critique.

Intellectual decolonisation and the danger of epistemic closure: the need for a critical decolonial theory

ABSTRACT This paper draws from the paradigm of Critical Theory (CT) and Decolonial Theory to engage in an introductory discussion on the need for a new methodological paradigm, namely a Critical Decolonial Theory. This is put forward in order to both argue for the imperative of introducing multiple narratives to the philosophical practice of contemporary social critique in South Africa, as well as to provide a cautionary note relating to how the decolonisation narrative itself could become a determinative ideology if it engages in what Lewis Gordon terms “epistemic closure.” While operating from within the framework and ideals of traditional CT and Amy Allen’s subsequent contribution to decolonising CT, we draw specifically from black practitioners of this critical philosophical tradition, namely Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Frantz Fanon, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Paulin Hountondji, and Achille Mbembe, in order to localise and ground our discussion of the need to problematise (i.e., consider both vindicatory and subversive aspects of) the decolonisation project.

Revisable A Priori as a Political Problem: Critique of Constitution in Critical Theory

According to the received view, Marxian (ideology) critique and Foucaultian (genealogical) critique constitute two divergent approaches of critical theory that have remarkably different goals and little in common. In this article, however, we identify a guiding thread that connects the Marxian and Foucaultian traditions and motivates a distinctive approach within critical theory we call the ‘critique of constitution’. The problem of restricted consciousness, we show, is the core problem in common between Michel Foucault's critical history of thought and Georg Lukács's theory of reification which underlies the tradition of Western Marxism and Frankfurt School critical theory. The problem concerns the limits of intelligibility and, by the same token, the apparent inevitability of the given social ontology. Our sense of what is possible depends on what we are able to think. But we know from the history of sciences that the limits of intelligibility change, thereby also altering our sense of what is possible. This becomes a political problem in connection with the intelligibility of social reality, because our restricted consciousness limits the alternatives we can so much as consider and seek to bring about. The critique of constitution, then, aims to expand the scope of possibility by revealing the contingent formation of the given limits of intelligibility. We argue that this is the paramount political task for Foucault and Lukács alike, other important differences notwithstanding.

Whats's critical about Critical Theory again? Critical Theory, ethnocentrism, sexism and racism

The purpose of the article is to examine some of the weaknesses of critical theory with regard to race and gender, as well as to critique the limitations of critical theory stemming from its ethnocentrism. In it the author argues for a return to the deeper engagement with the breadth of contemporary social, political, and emancipatory theories and movements as seen in the first generation of the Frankfurt School. As a case in point, he shows that Angela Davis' omission from the history of critical theory indicates the degree to which even critical theory is haunted by racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism. These shortcomings of critical theory make it necessary to revisit critical theory once again, carrying forward the provocation made by Nancy Fraser in her essay entitled “What’s Critical About Critical Theory?”. As a result of the argument, the author suggests that a new critical theory, which brings Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis into contact with other recent theories, would lead to more fruitful forms of critical theory that would help overcome the one-dimensional concerns of traditional critical theory.

Critical theory and North American indigenous thought

In recent years, critical theorists such as Amy Allen and Robert Nichols have aimed to “decolonize critical theory,” by which they mean to make the tradition of critical theory less hostile to, and more compatible with, the ideas and movements of Indigenous peoples. In this article, however, I argue these efforts have failed to consider the relationship of two key elements of critical theory with Indigenous thought: that all normativity is generated immanently to historically and socially located struggle, and that normativity is negatively defined. These two elements, I argue, are not fully endorsed in the work of many Indigenous thinkers. By drawing on the work of a diverse group of contemporary Indigenous scholars, I show, first, that nature is generally a relevant normative category in Indigenous thinking in a way that is irreducible to historical location. Second, I argue that for many Native scholars, right action is not simply a matter of resisting colonialism. While resistance features heavily, of course, I suggest that Indigenous thinking often includes a substantive positive vision of living well that has not—as of yet—been considered by critical theorists.

DAS FISSURAS ENTRE SER E DEVER SER: AUTORREFLEXÕES DE UMA PROFESSORA DE EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA

ABSTRACT: Since the 1980s there has been a certain fascination with the theme of the reflective/researching teacher. Little is said, however, that this discussion is part of a larger one, which criticizes positivism and rationality. Following the tradition of Critical Social Theory, some theoretical and methodological assumptions were discussed in order to then reflect on the teaching practice and the school context in which this author is inserted. Violence and indifference as inherent to the civilizing process, of which education is part, and the confrontation of the contradictions between the teacher’s being and “must be” as an antidote to the reproduction of barbarism, appear as central themes. The use of records and memories of the period of initiation to teaching and insertion in the work environment (years 2019 and 2020) was made, with attention to my doing teaching and a latent “teacher must be” in daily school life, in its interconnections with social and cultural aspects. In the elaboration work (cognitive and affective) of the experience, the little rationality prevailing in the school space was one of the key points of the analysis, revealing itself, among others: the insistence on rhetoric and educational postulates, at the expense of denying reality; the predominance of the principle of competition, especially among peers and with singularities that relate to gender issues; and the difficulty of facing violence in physical education classes. It ends with some notes on teacher self-reflection, especially the urgency that the ethical-political principle overlaps merely instrumental/performative objectives in this process.

CRT, information, and disability: An intersectional commentary

Grounded in my perspective as a deaf, Black, and trans librarian who has worked in many Library and Information Science (LIS) roles, I argue in this paper that information scientists and professionals could close the gap in representation and information access by applying a knowledge of intersectionality to our work. I make the case for this by presenting examples of three Black historical “hidden figures” who shaped life as we know it in the USA, highlighting the erased dimensions of their lives as disabled people. Despite this geographical setting, these intersectional counter stories are relevant to addressing local areas of inequity in information access and resources worldwide. This community commentary paper addresses a serious gap in scholarship and practice around the erasure of disability from both Black history and LIS theory and practice, and follows in the Critical Race Theory (CRT) traditions of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) and counter-storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) to bridge this gulf. Applying CRT and related concepts to LIS work prepares the ground for immediate and future needs for equitable access to resources, by acknowledging those who may be hindered by their racial/ableist/queerphobic biases and the way they may unknowingly play into systemic oppression, just by their participation. This will maintain relevance and contribute to the creation of equity for Black and brown marginalized LIS staff and community members going forward. Having additional systemic support for our most marginalized staff members would create ripple effects in information access and cultural competency in the way we are able to see barriers and opportunities, and the field as a whole would benefit.

Glanz und Elend des Sozialen

Abstract This article retraces and discusses the philosophical itinerary of Axel Honneth, from the groundbreaking book Struggle for Recognition up to the recent essays Freedom’s Right and The Idea of Socialism. In the first section, I examine Honneth’s programmatic concept of social pathology in relation to Ernst Cassirer’s idea of the secularisation of theodicy (i. e. the attribution of responsibility for human suffering to society) and to the enlightenment legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the second section, after assessing Honneth’s position in the tradition of critical theory, I analyse his philosophical views. I identify two different theoretical frameworks in Honneth’s work: on the one hand, the theory of the struggle for recognition; on the other hand, the recent theory of social freedom. While the first is grounded in a formal and allegedly universal anthropology, the second draws on the Hegelian doctrine of the ethical life and develops a historicist and internalist model of reconstructive social criticism. Finally, in the third section, I critically address the “divinisation of the social” entailed in Honneth’s project of social pathologies’ critique, and argue that Honneth’s trust in the normative power of intersubjectivity might be excessive.

From otium to opium (and back again?): Lockdown’s leisure industry, hyper-synchronisation and the philosophy of walking

ABSTRACT This article provides an account of the cultural changes induced by the pandemic, and draws on the tradition of critical theory (especially the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, and Fromm) and the work of Bernard Stiegler to critically assess their impact. It is argued that the rise of online forms of consumption based around streaming have had a deleterious impact on the critical faculties of the individual, and argues that the practice of walking – as proposed by Frederic Gros – could potentially provide a remedy to the problems caused by the increase of uncritical cultural consumption. In this respect, it provides an original account of the relevance of both the tradition of critical theory and the work of Stiegler to the pandemic, together with providing a discussion around the act of walking as an active measure that one can implement in one’s life to counteract and (hopefully) overcome the detrimental effects that the commodification of leisure time has fostered during the pandemic.

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance

What is democratic backsliding?

What is democratic backsliding?

Introduction to Nicos Poulantzas, ‘Theory and History: Brief Remarks on the Object of Capital’

Abstract In this Introduction I illuminate the importance of Nicos Poulantzas’s participation at a 1967 colloquium in Frankfurt commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Capital. This colloquium is the only published record of a dialogue between a representative of Louis Althusser’s interpretation of Marx and a member of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and thus casts light on the relationship between these two traditions of critical social theory. After contextualising the colloquium and summarising Poulantzas’s paper, I outline some of the elements of the Frankfurt response to the Althusserian interpretation of Marx by referring to Alfred Schmidt’s contribution to the colloquium, including his reaction to Poulantzas’s paper.

Living bioethics, theories and children's consent to heart surgery.

This analysis is about practical living bioethics and how law, ethics and sociology understand and respect children's consent to, or refusal of, elective heart surgery. Analysis of underlying theories and influences will contrast legalistic bioethics with living bioethics. In-depth philosophical analysis compares social science traditions of positivism, interpretivism, critical theory and functionalism and applies them to bioethics and childhood, to examine how living bioethics may be encouraged or discouraged. Illustrative examples are drawn from research interviews and observations in two London paediatric cardiac units. This paper is one of a series on how the multidisciplinary cardiac team members all contribute to the complex mosaic of care when preparing and supporting families' informed consent to surgery. The living bioethics of justice, care and respect for children and their consent depends on theories and practices, contexts and relationships. These can all be undermined by unseen influences: the history of adult-centric ethics; developmental psychology theories; legal and financial pressures that require consent to be defined as an adult contract; management systems and daily routines in healthcare that can intimidate families and staff; social inequalities. Mainstream theories in the clinical ethics literature markedly differ from the living bioethics in clinical practices. We aim to contribute to raising standards of respectful paediatric bioethics and to showing the relevance of virtue and feminist ethics, childhood studies and children's rights.