Showing papers on "Critical theory published in 2015"

Recovering the politics of the city From the ‘post-political city’ to a ‘method of equality’ for critical urban geography

Abstract: This paper uses Jacque Ranciere's understanding of politics to ask what makes cities political entities. We review existing urban geography debates to identify some of the defining features of urba...

Thinking Ourselves to Liberation?: Advancing Sociopolitical Action in Critical Consciousness

Abstract: Freire advanced critical consciousness as a tool for the liberation of oppressed communities. Based on his ideas, scholars of theory and practice from myriad disciplines have written about how to advance critical consciousness (CC) among oppressed peoples. We reviewed CC theory and practice articles in scholarly journals with the goal of identifying key elements of CC, advancing practice, and aligning theory with insights from practice. The most prominent elements of CC theory we found were fostering awareness of sociopolitical circumstances, encouraging critical questioning, and fostering collective identity. Surprisingly, few theorists or practitioners gave extensive attention to the community action component of critical consciousness. This led us to give this component of CC close attention and to develop a framework that describes four aspects of “sociopolitical action.” We conclude with a recommendation that CC programming include targets or objectives for sociopolitical action from the outset of a project, rather than limiting CC groups to critical social analysis and problematization. Youth community organizing is a promising strategy for bridging the gap between critical social analysis and sociopolitical action. This approach calls for ongoing partnerships between career researchers and community-based, veteran activists with the expertise to help young people make the transition from insight to action.

Critical medical humanities: embracing entanglement, taking risks

Abstract: What can the medical humanities achieve? This paper does not seek to define what is meant by the medical humanities, nor to adjudicate the exact disciplinary or interdisciplinary knowledges it should offer, but rather to consider what it might be capable of doing. Exploring the many valences of the word ‘critical’, we argue here for a critical medical humanities characterised by: (i) a widening of the sites and scales of ‘the medical’ beyond the primal scene of the clinical encounter; (ii) greater attention not simply to the context and experience of health and illness, but to their constitution at multiple levels; (iii) closer engagement with critical theory, queer and disability studies, activist politics and other allied fields; (iv) recognition that the arts, humanities and social sciences are best viewed not as in service or in opposition to the clinical and life sciences, but as productively entangled with a ‘biomedical culture’; and, following on from this, (v) robust commitment to new forms of interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration. We go on to introduce the five other articles published in this special issue of the journal, reflecting on the ways in which collaboration and critique are articulated in their analyses of immunology, critical neuroscience, toxicity, global clinical labour, and psychological coercion and workfare. As these articles demonstrate, embracing the complex role of critical collaborator—one based on notions of entanglement, rather than servility or antagonism—will, we suggest, develop the imaginative and creative heterodox qualities and practices which have long been recognised as core strengths of the medical humanities.

Where now for the critique of the liberal peace

Abstract: This article seeks to take stock of the critique of the liberal peace and identify what it has and has not achieved. It also asks ‘where do we go from here?’ The article surveys an agenda for future research and can also be read as a rebuttal of some recent literature that has attempted to shut down the liberal peace debate. The article opens with a quick recap of the bases of the critique of the liberal peace. It then outlines the ‘achievements’ of the debate and examines the failings and oversights of the original critique. Questions are raised about the epistemology and terms of the debate, and of the ability of critical intellectual projects to break through the material power held by mainstream intellectual and policy actors. In its final substantive section, the article asks ‘where next for the critique of the liberal peace?’ We conclude by highlighting avenues of research that might be fruitfully explored.

Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse‐Historical Approach

Abstract: The discourse-historical approach (DHA) belongs in the broadly defined field of critical discourse studies (CDS). Many theoretical and also methodological concepts used in DHA are equally valid for other strands in critical discourse studies—even if their contexts of emergence have led to different toolkits. Still, these approaches draw on each other, thereby reproducing a common conceptual frame while they develop their own distinct orientations. The DHA is distinctive both at the level of research interest and methodical orientation (an interest in identity construction and in unjustified discrimination; a focus on the historical dimensions of discourse formation) and with respect to its epistemological foundation—that is, with respect to its being oriented toward the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and in particular toward Habermas's language philosophy. Keywords: argument and persuasion; cultural/critical communication; interdisciplinarity; language and social interaction; media theory; argumentation; critical theory; discourse studies; intertextuality; perspectivation

Critical Theory: The Key Concepts

Abstract: Critical Theory: The Key Concepts introduces over 300 widely-used terms, categories and ideas drawing upon well-established approaches like new historicism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and narratology as well as many new critical theories of the last twenty years such as Actor-Network Theory, Global Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Speculative Realism. This book explains the key concepts at the heart of a wide range of influential theorists from Agamben to Žižek. Entries range from concise definitions to longer more explanatory essays and include terms such as: Aesthetics Desire Dissensus Dromocracy Hegemony Ideology Intersectionality Late Capitalism Performativity Race Suture Featuring cross-referencing throughout, a substantial bibliography and index, Critical Theory: The Key Concepts is an accessible and easy-to-use guide. This book is an invaluable introduction covering a wide range of subjects for anyone who is studying or has an interest in critical theory (past and present).

Politics that matter: Thinking about power and justice with the new materialists

Abstract: Although wide-ranging in their aspects and concerns, ‘new materialist’ approaches in feminist and political theory share a commitment to trouble binaries central to humanist inquiry, for example sensuous/ideal, natural/artificial, subject/object. In distinction from an ‘old materialism’ rooted in Marxian critiques of idealism and continuing that tradition’s humanist bent, the new materialisms underscore a need to reconceptualize matter: nature, in both its animate and inanimate guises, but also the apparatuses, artifacts and other objects that are produced by and productive of human capacities, and indeed of the world itself. In so doing, these approaches compel a rethinking of the boundary between human and nonhuman. At stake is the claim that such reconceptualizations can clarify our ethical imperatives and political possibilities: a recognition that matter is not the passive receptacle or recipient of human agency, which is in turn neither sovereign nor unified, conditions a post-humanist perspective said to promote generosity, responsibility, and/or receptiveness to difference. From the perspective of an earlier materialism, by contrast, where exploitation and oppression happen to ‘species-beings’ rather than being enacted through such biologistic distinctions, political and ethical critique hinges on a human/nonhuman divide. The curious commodity that is labor power, for example, or the conundrums of commodity fetishism and alienated labor, are demystified – and the capitalist system perpetuating them is exposed as dehumanizing – through analyses that traffic heavily in the binaries now being questioned. In that earlier context, subjects appeared as makers of their own history (although of course not ‘just as they please[d]’ (Marx, 1996, p. 32), objectivity was accorded both to social structures and to historical materialist analyses of them, and the power of ‘things’ was more likely to be linked to their reification than to an inhering vibrancy. Pursuing a thorough investigation of the differences between these interpretive paradigms is well beyond the scope of our essay. But we begin by contrasting them in

Misdevelopments, Pathologies, and Normative Revolutions: Normative Reconstruction as Method of Critical Theory

Abstract: In this article I argue that the method of normative reconstruction underlying Freedom's Right undermines Critical Theory's aspiration to be a force that is unreservedly critical and progressive I start out by giving a brief account of the four premises of the method of normative reconstruction and unpack their implications for how Honneth conceptualizes social pathologies and misdevelopments, specifically that these notions are no longer linked to radical critique and normative revolution In the second part, I demonstrate that abandoning forms of radical critique and normative revolution is internally linked to adopting this method, before arguing that Freedom's Right contains no resources to account for why abandoning them does not amount to a deficiency In the final part, I point out two problematic implications of turning away from radical critique and normative revolution for the very project Honneth pursues in Freedom's Right I show that Honneth's own view about the limited scope of appl

‘The Medical’ and ‘Health’ in a Critical Medical Humanities

Abstract: As befits an emerging field of enquiry, there is on-going discussion about the scope, role and future of the medical humanities. One relatively recent contribution to this debate proposes a differentiation of the field into two distinct terrains, ‘medical humanities’ and ‘health humanities,’ and calls for a supersession of the former by the latter. In this paper, we revisit the conceptual underpinnings for a distinction between ‘the medical’ and ‘health’ by looking at the history of an analogous debate between ‘medical geography’ and ‘the geographies of health’ that has, over the last few years, witnessed a re-blurring of the distinction. Highlighting the value of this debate within the social sciences for the future development of the medical humanities, we call for scholars to take seriously the challenges of critical and cultural theory, community-based arts and health, and the counter-cultural creative practices and strategies of activist movements in order to meet the new research challenges and fulfill the radical potential of a critical medical humanities.

The co-operative university: Labour, property and pedagogy

Abstract: I begin this article by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education, and then focus on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic framework of ‘Student as Producer’. Throughout I employ the work of Karl Marx to theorise the role of labour and property in a ‘co-operative university’, drawing particularly on later Marxist writers who argue that Marx’s labour theory of value should be understood as a critique of labour under capitalism, rather than one developed from the standpoint of labour.

‘That racism thing’: a critical race discourse analysis of a conflict over the proposed closure of a black high school

Abstract: Using critical race discourse analysis, this study examines descriptions of a heated controversy over the proposed closure of the only primarily black high school in a large urban city. Participants included community members and the district and school leaders who were key in the controversy. Based on Foucault’s analysis of power we looked for conflicts in the narratives of the participants in their description of the controversy. Four strands of discursive conflict emerged: the purpose of school; the relationship of school and community; communication; and the issue of racism. Taking these four strands together, the themes found in the discourse of the community members enacted an emancipatory knowledge paradigm, while the themes found in the discourse of the administrators enacted a technical-rational, instrumental paradigm of knowledge.

Strategies of critique in International Relations: From Foucault and Latour towards Marx:

Abstract: Critique is back on the scholarly agenda. Since the financial crisis, critique has been debated in philosophy and sociology with renewed rigour. International Relations is currently picking up on these developments. Yet, the critique of capitalism is largely absent in International Relations. This article argues that the theoretical resources deployed among ‘radical’ International Relations help explain this phenomenon. In order to rectify this, the article aims to resituate Marx at the centre of the debate about critique. Based on a discussion of the understandings of critique by Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, the article shows that their conscious focus on the small and the contingent has prevented a more totalizing strategy of critique from taking hold. The article illustrates this unwillingness to situate social life in our capitalist social whole by zooming in on ‘resistant’ intervention scholarship. Speaking to the nature of International Relations more broadly, in a second step, the article shows that this lack of ‘totalizing’ analysis has been present in International Relations and International Political Economy since their inception. Taking into account Marxian and Critical Theoretical understandings of totality, the article outlines a totalizing strategy of critique. This strategy has two components: it takes capitalism as such seriously; and it offers a methodology to implement this substantial shift using Marx’s dynamic method of ‘concretization’.

Critical management studies and critical theory: A review:

Abstract: Critical management studies (CMS) has pervaded the field of management studies, claiming to be based on the Frankfurt School of critical theory. This paper examines that claim. It starts with a bri...

Embodied contradictions: Capitalism, social reproduction and body formation

Abstract: This paper argues that Marxist feminism offers a powerful approach to body formation theory. Building on social reproduction theory's key innovations, as well as its recognition that Marx's ‘critique’ of political economy is unfinished business, I develop my argument through a constructive critique of three manifestations of the fetishism of wage form, respectively problematizing the distinction between labor and labor power, the limits of the concept of labor within production-centered approach, and the embodied nature of labor power. In recovering the centrality of the body for critical social theory, social reproduction theory sheds new light into our understanding of the complex processes by which the contradictions of capital are displaced and ultimately embodied in specific ways, and therefore offers a powerful approach attentive to the ways in which the physical body shapes, and is shaped by, social and material forces.

Conflations, possibilities, and foreclosures: Global citizenship education in a multicultural context

Abstract: This paper presents a critical framework applied to findings from a critical discourse analysis of curriculum and lesson plans in Alberta to examine the assumption that Canada is an ideal place for global citizenship education. The analysis draws on a framework that presents a critique of modernity to recognize a conflation within calls for new approaches to educating citizens for the twenty-first century. A main finding is that although the Alberta curriculum reflects important potential for promoting a critical approach, a conflation of different versions of liberalism often results in a false sense of multiple perspectives and a foreclosure of potential. The paper argues for a critical approach to global citizenship education that engages with the tensions inherent to issues of diversity rather than stepping over or reducing them to theoretically and conceptually vague ideas of universalism and consensus.

Teaching as Inquiry: Well Intentioned, but Fundamentally Flawed

Abstract: This article draws on a larger research project that questions the impacts of ‘21st century learning’ on teachers and leaders. Implicit is an evaluation of the promise of futures pedagogies to deepen teacher reflective practice. Critical theoretic and critical hermeneutic approaches underpin this research. It therefore analyses policy and documents critically, considers existing research critically, and triangulates by reference to interview material. In arguing for a concept of collaborative, critical teacher reflective practice, this article presents teaching as inquiry as a flawed model, suggesting the label ‘teaching as inquiry’ be abandoned.

The social philosophy of Gillian Rose : speculative diremptions, absolute ethical life

Abstract: This thesis provides an original reconstruction of Gillian Rose’s work as a distinctive social philosophy within the Frankfurt School tradition that holds together the methodological, logical, descriptive, metaphysical and normative moments of social theory; provides a critical theory of modern society; and offers distinctive versions of ideology critique based on the history of jurisprudence, and mutual recognition based on a Hegelian view of appropriation. Rose’s philosophy integrates three key moments of the Frankfurt tradition: a view of the social totality as both an epistemological necessity and normative ideal; a philosophy that is its own metaphilosophy because it integrates its own logical and social preconditions within itself; and a critical analysis of modern society that is simultaneously a critique of social theory. Rose’s work is original in the way it organises these three moments around absolute ethical life as the social totality, its Hegelian basis, and its metaphysical focus on law and jurisprudence. Rose’s Hegelian philosophy includes an account of reason that is both social and logical without reducing philosophy to the sociology of knowledge, thereby steering between dogmatism and relativism. Central to this position are the historically developing nature of rationality and knowing, and an account of the nature of explanation as depending on a necessarily and necessarily imperfectly posited totality. No totality is ever fully attained but is brought to view through the Hegelian-speculative exposition of history, dirempted experience, and the tensions immanent to social theories. Rose explored one main social totality within her social philosophy – absolute ethical life – as the implied unity of law and ethics, and of finite and infinite. This enables a critique simultaneously and immanently of society and social philosophy in three ways. First, of both the social form of bourgeois property law and social contract theories reflective of it. Second, of social theorising that insufficiently appreciates its jurisprudential determinations and/or attempts to eliminate metaphysics. Third, the broken middle shows the state-civil society and the law-ethics diremptions as two fundamental features of modern society and as frequently unacknowledged influences on social theorising.

Ideology Critique from Hegel and Marx to Critical Theory

Abstract: In the postscript to Traditional and Critical Theory,1 Max Horkheimer writes that critical theory must be understood as the heir to German idealism. More specifically, Horkheimer ties the project of a critical theory of society to a watershed moment in the history of philosophy that has come to be known as the Copernican turn — namely, Kant’s insight that the objects of human knowledge and experience are inextricably tied to our spontaneous, productive activity. In binding the objects of experience to human activity, Kant sets in motion an entire project of critique in which what is continually subject to scrutiny is the very form and capacity of reason itself. Critique becomes, in essence, a form a self-critique, one in which reason itself is continually put on trial. However, this immediately creates a paradox for the very project of critique: in putting reason on trial, reason stands as both the accused and the judge in the case of its own legitimacy, for reason is both the object of critique and the very activity that makes critique possible. As the heir to German idealism, this paradox comes to define the critique of ideology, and cuts to the very heart of the methodology of critical theory. To dwell a little longer on Horkheimer’s suggestion, we can discern a second and connected sense in which critical theory can be understood as the heir of German idealism. The critique of reason, for Kant and even more emphatically for his successors, was essentially a project that aimed to understand the actuality of human freedom — the critique of reason is at once the demonstration of rational life as a free life. In the attempt to demonstrate the actuality of freedom, it was Hegel who first turned from the critique of pure reason to the critique of reason embedded in social, historical reality, and it is this move that has been definitive for critical theory from Marx all the way up to the present. With Hegel, idealism effectively becomes social philosophy and critique becomes inseparable from social critique.2 In the transformation of the critique of reason into the critique of social reality, the critique of ideology has become an indispensable method for assessing the extent to which a form of life — at once a social formation and an actualization of reason — can enable or block the realization of freedom for its members. The critique of ideology becomes necessary as soon as reason ceases to be pure reason, as soon as the actuality of freedom becomes wedded to social reality. In what follows, I explore and defend ideology critique as a method for critical theory whose operation is best understood as descended from the project of the critique of reason. Tracing this genealogy is necessary for two reasons: First, it allows us to understand what critical theory calls the dialectics of immanence and transcendence (the classic problem of being embedded in the social reality we want to criticize according to a non-external standard) as a structural feature of ideology critique, which, contrary to popular opinion, need not be overcome. Rather, this essential characteristic of ideology critique is common to all modes of critique that accept a socialized and historicized version of the Copernican turn. Second, by turning to Hegel and Marx in particular, what becomes evident is that the dialectics of immanence and transcendence must be understood more concretely as the dialectics of life and self-consciousness, a relation that defines the universal form of rational, free activity. Specifically, I will argue that there is an important structural parallel between Hegel’s concept of the Idea and Marx’s concept of species-being that allows us to view the problem of immanence and transcendence as it arises in ideology critique in a new light. Understanding the relation between life and self-consciousness is crucial for ideology critique because what ideologies distort is the relation between self-consciousness and life, a relation that is fundamental to the actualization of human freedom. In distorting this fundamental relation, ideologies characteristically turn the conditions of freedom into agents of repression, asserting transcendent authority over our most basic life activities and social reality itself. As a working definition, we can say that ideologies are at once social practices and forms of rationality that distort the relation between life and self-consciousness and block the full actualization of human reason and freedom. Ideologies are thus social pathologies, wrong ways of living.3 My argument will proceed in four parts. In the first part, I outline the fundamental logic behind the dialectics of immanence and transcendence and show how this logic defines ideology critique. After affirming that the dialectics of immanence and transcendence are unavoidable for critique, I turn in part two to an analysis of two central concepts that illuminate this method as the dialectics of life and self-consciousness: what Hegel calls the Idea, and Marx’s conception of Gattungswesen (species-being). In part three, I turn to the ways in which ideologies operate by distorting the relation between self-consciousness and life, and part

Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Critical Theory

Abstract: Feminist theory needs both explanatory‐diagnostic and anticipatory‐utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory‐diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory‐utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory‐utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation is compatible with a complex explanatory‐diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique.

Critical Theory of Technology and STS

Abstract: Introduction Long before contemporary Science and Technology Studies (STS), Marxism, pragmatism and various theories of modernity were associated with the study of technology. These were broad and often speculative theories that related technology to a social and political context. STS sought to supplant these competing approaches and has been largely successful. Today few look to Mumford or Dewey, Heidegger or Marcuse for insight into technology. However, when STS took what Wiebe Bijker called "the detour into the academy" to focus on empirically based case histories, it gave up the political concerns that had inspired these earlier approaches. This renunciation was easier to justify before the widespread controversies over medical care, the Internet and the environment directly implicated technology in so many different aspects of contemporary politics. Some STS researchers have now also become aware of the more politicized approaches favored in the developing world, especially Latin America. But how can the achievements of STS be preserved in the context of politically charged investigations of controversial issues? This talk proposes one way of doing this, the critical theory of technology. Critical theory of technology draws on fundamental methodological assumptions of STS to elaborate themes of the earlier tradition of modernity theory, specifically Lukacs’s early Marxism and the Frankfurt School. The key such assumptions are the notions of underdetermination, interpretative flexibility, and closure developed in the social constructivist tradition. In addition, the concept of co-construction drawn from actor network theory is useful methodologically, although critical theory of technology does not follow ANT to its radical ontological conclusions. The application of these notions to particular technologies is fruitful, but attempts to generalize them as a full fledged social theory, for example, in the writings of Bruno Latour, are not as successful as the case histories for which STS is famous. The attempt to build a political theory on the basis of STS needs to confront the principle insight of the earlier tradition, namely, the strange fact that modern societies have a “rational” culture. By this is meant the generalization of methods and concepts from mathematics and natural science as a framework for thought and action in every social sphere. This is not merely a subjective disposition but is reflected in the multiplication bureaucracies, technologies and technical disciplines which effectively organize and control most of social life. A phenomenon of this scope requires a broad approach. Critical theory of technology addresses this issue from the standpoint of the theory of rationality elaborated by the Frankfurt School. The articulation of this theory in the context of an STS-inspired approach requires significant revisions. Where the Frankfurt School proposed a very general critique of “instrumental rationality,” critical theory of technology looks to a more concrete critique of the social bias of technical disciplines, bureaucracies and technologies. The identification of such biases employs methods explored in STS and yields a critical approach to the culture of modern societies. Methods Following STS, critical theory of technology highlights the inherent contingency and complexity of technical artifacts masked by the coherence of technical explanations. In this context I suggest that the concept of a palimpsest can serve as a useful analogy. Technological design resembles a palimpsest: multiple layers of influence coming from very different regions of society and responding to different, even opposed, logics converge on a shared object. Marx sketched such an approach in the "Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy." There he writes that "[t]he concrete is concrete, because it is a combination of many objects with different destinations, i.e. a unity of diverse elements. In our thought, it therefore appears as a process of synthesis, as a result, and not as a starting point, although it is the real starting point and, therefore, also the starting point of observation and conception" (Marx 1857/1904, 293). In this passage Marx anticipates the genealogical method Foucault found in Nietzsche. These de-reifying approaches treat social "things," such as artifacts, institutions and laws, as assemblages of functional components held together by their social roles. The components disaggregate and recombine as society changes. Social history cannot rely on an Aristotelian model in which an essence endures through accidental changes. It must identify these ontological differences in the construction and meaning of its objects. The genealogical approach is useful in the case of technology. Devices and systems often retain the same name while changing components. Genealogy is especially applicable where the technical code imposed by the dominant actor is not alone in shaping design. In such cases the technology must serve a multiplicity of interests through more or less coherent assemblages of parts with a variety of functions. The interests are also translated into higher level meanings, such as ideologies and worldviews. The technocratic concept of efficiency is an example, at each historical stage translating particular interests and technical arrangements conducive to the exercise of technocratic authority. Technical disciplines and artifacts give a deceptively rational form to the multiple and ambiguous influences that appear clearly for what they are in other social institutions. Conclusion The writings of Marx and Foucault free us from a naive belief in the universality of technological and administrative efficiency. In this they converge with recent Science and Technology Studies which has rediscovered the interdependence of the social and the technical. The technical underdetermination of artifacts leaves room for social choice between different designs that have overlapping functions but better serve one or another social interest. The key point is the influence of the social on the content of the artifact and not merely on such external factors as the pace of development, packaging or usages. This means that context is not merely external to technology, but actually penetrates its rationality, carrying social requirements into the very workings of the device. References Feenberg, Andrew (2014). The Philosophy of Praxis. London: Verso. Feenberg, Andrew (2010). Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory

Abstract: The first major book of feminist critical theory published in the United States is now available in an expanded second edition. This widely cited pioneering work presents a new introduction by the editor and a new bibliography of feminist critical theory from the last decade. This book has become indispensable to an understanding of feminist theory. Contributors include Cheri Register, Dorin Schumacher, Marcia Holly, Barbara Currier Bell, Carol Ohmann, Carolyn Heilbrun, Catherine Stimpson, and Barbara A. White."

Axel Honneth : a critical theory of the social

Abstract: Table of Contents Abbreviations 1 Introduction 1.1 A Brief Biography 1.2 Honneth s Themes 1.3 Intellectual Contexts 2 Individuals Struggle for Recognition 2.1 The Intersubjectivist Turn 2.2 Self-Confidence and Love 2.3 Self-Respect and Rights 2.4 Self-Esteem and Solidarity 2.5 Antecedent Recognition 2.6 Critical Perspectives 3 Social Struggles for Recognition 3.1 Conflicts of Interest vs. Moral Conflicts 3.2 Social Struggles for Recognition 3.3 Historical Progress 3.4 Critical Perspectives 4 Diagnosing Social Pathologies 4.1 Social Philosophy as Social Diagnosis 4.2 Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders 4.3 Critical Perspectives 4.4 Recapitulation 5 Recognition and Markets 5.1 Work and Recognition 5.2 Fraser s Challenges, Honneth s Responses 5.3 Assessing an Unfinished Debate 6 Social Freedom and Recognition 6.1 Introduction 6.2 Social Freedom 6.3 Social Spheres 6.4 Innovations and Critical Perspectives 7 Concluding Speculations Bibliography

Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification

Abstract: Social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are enormously popular: they are continuously ranked among the most frequently accessed websites worldwide. However there are as yet few studies which combine critical theoretical and empirical research in the context of digital and social media. The aim of this book is to study the constraints and emancipatory potentials of new media and to assess to what extent digital and social media can contribute to strengthen the idea of the communication and network commons, and a commons-based information society. Based on a critical theory and political economy approach, this book explores: the foundational concepts of a critical theory of media, technology, and society users’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards the antagonistic character and the potentials and risks of social media whether technological and/or social changes are required in order to bring about real social media and human liberation. Critical Theory and Social Media examines both academic discourse on, and users’ responses to, new media, making it a valuable tool for international scholars and students of sociology, media and communication studies, social theory, new media, and information society studies. Its clear and interesting insights into corporate practices of the global new media sector will mean that it appeals to critical social media users around the world.