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Sociology and Social Science / Fiction: Confronting an Increasingly Uncertain Future

As we keep transforming the world we inhabit and increase in numbers, with myriad implications, science fiction provides a frame for asking increasingly urgent questions that other genres, and the social sciences and social theories, tend to neglect or only touch upon in passing, or with great trepidation. The publications listed here highlight and illustrate the importance of sociologists and social theorists directly and constructively engaging with the future, with the concern with present social forms and societal configurations constituting the ever so fleeting meeting point of the past and the future: the time-horizon of sociological investigations mus shift from the present in relation to the past (and vice versa), to the present and the past in relation to the future. This involves efforts at discerning the future of science and social science, and the future of modern society that science is shaping to an increasing extent, and which social science must be committed to illuminating.

2020
Harry F. Dahms
Adorno’s Critique of the New Right-Wing Extremism: How (Not) to Face the Past, Present, and Future
disClosure: a social theory journal
29 (1): 129-179

2020
Lawrence Hazelrigg
Future Worlds of Social Science:
Essays on Sociality

(e-version)

JUST PUBLISHED!
(print version)

2020
Alexander Stoner
Critical reflections on America’s Green New Deal: Capital, labor, and the dynamics of contemporary social change
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

2020
Harry F. Dahms (Guest Editor)
Social Theory and Science Fiction
Special Issue of Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal
(with essays by Lawrence Hazelrigg, George Lundskow, Charles Thorpe, Sarah Macmillen, Roberto Ortiz, and the guest editor)

2019
Harry F. Dahms (ed.)
The Challenge of Progress:
Theory between Critique and Ideology

(Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 36)
(Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2019)
(with review essays of Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Deolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory by Reha Kadakal, George Steinmetz, Karen Ng, and Kevin Olson, and a reply by Amuy Allen, and contributions by Robert Antonio, Lawrence Hazelrigg, Daniel Harrison, Timothy Luke, Patricia Arend and Katherine Comeau, and Shawn Van Valkenburgh.

2018
Harry F. Dahms and R. Scott Frey
“Epilogue:  The Wider View”
in: Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Environmental Injustice in Comparative and Historical Perspective
co-edited with R. Scott Frey and Paul K. Gellert
(Palgrave, 2018), pp. 307-316.

2018
Joel Crombez
The Anxiety and the Ecstasy of Technical Vertigo: Psychological and Sociological Foundations of Critical Socioanalysis from the Italian Renaissance to the 21st Century

2017
Steven Panageotou
The Three Dimensions of Political Action in United States Democracy: Corporations as Political Actors and “Franchise Governments”

2017
Anthony J. Knowles
Automation, Work, and Ideology:
The Next Industrial Revolution and the Transformation of”Labor”

2016
Joel Crombez and Harry F. Dahms
“Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Digital Ontotheology:  Towards a Critical Rethinking of Science Fiction as Theory”
in: Bulletin of Science, Technology, & Society (Special issue on Science & Science Fiction) 35 (3-4) 2016: 104-113.

2015
Harry F. Dahms
“Toward a Critical Theory of Capital in the 21st Century: Thomas Piketty between Adam Smith and the Prospect of Apocalypse”
Critical Sociology 41 (2) 2015: 359-374.

2015
Asafa Jalata and Harry F. Dahms
“Theorizing Modern Society as an Inverted Reality:  How Critical Theory and Indigenous Critiques of Globalization Must Learn from Each Other”
in: Globalization, Critique, and Social Theory:  Diagnoses and Challenges (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 33), ed. by Harry F. Dahms (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2015), pp. 75-133.

2014
Harry F. Dahms and Eric Royal Lybeck
“Barriers and Conduits to Social Justice:
Universities in the Twenty-First Century”
in: Social Justice and the University:  Globalization, Human Rights, and the Future of Democracy; co-edited with Jon Shefner, Robert Jones and Asafa Jalata
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

2012
Harry F. Dahms
“Theorizing Europe as the Future of Modern Society: European Integration between Thick Norms and Thin Politics”
in: Comparative Sociology 11 (5) 2012:  762-781.

2012
Jon Shefner and Harry F. Dahms
“Civil Society and the State in the Neoliberal Era:  Dynamics of Friends and Enemies”
in: Theorizing Modern Society as a Dynamic Process, co-edited with Lawrence Hazelrigg (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 30) 2012: 235-62.

2006
Harry F. Dahms
“Does Alienation have a Future?
Recapturing the Core of Critical Theory”
in: The Evolution of Alienation:  Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium, ed. L. Langman and D.K. Fishman
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), pp. 23-46.

2006
Harry F. Dahms
“Capitalism Unbound?
Peril and Promise of Basic Income”
In: Basic Income Studies 1(1) 2006.

Landscape, Water, Rock, Spaceship

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