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This handbook on relational sociology covers a rapidly growing approach in the social sciences—one which is connected to the interests of a large, diverse pool of researchers across a range of disciplines. Relational sociology has been one of the key foundations of the “relational turn” in human sciences since the 1980s, and it offers a unique opportunity to redefine the basic epistemological and ontological principles of sociology as we know it. The contributors collected here aim to elucidate the complexity and the scope of this growing approach by dealing with three central questions: Where does relational sociology come from and what are its principal concerns? What are the main theoretical and methodological currents within relational sociology? What have we studied in relational sociology and what are the results?
Edited by François Depelteau and Christopher Powell, this volume and its companion, Applying Relational Sociology: Networks, Relations, addresses fundamental questions about what relational sociology is and how it works.
Edited by François Depelteau and Christopher Powell, this volume and its companion, Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues, addresses fundamental questions about what relational sociology is and how it works.
This book will compare the approach and works of Norbert Elias, well known for his analysis of the civilizing process, his work on sport and violence and, more largely, his figurational approach, with other important social theories both classical and contemporary.
This edited collection brings together texts that discuss current major issues in our troubled times through the lens of Norbert Elias’s sociology. It sheds light on both the contemporary world and some of Elias’s most controversial concepts. Through examination of the ‘current affairs’, political and social contemporary changes, the authors in this collection present new and challenging ways of understanding these social processes and figurations. Ultimately, the objective of the book is to embrace and utilise some of the more polemical aspects of Elias’s legacy, such as the exploration of decivilizing processes, decivilizing spurts, and dys-civilization. It investigates to what extent Elias’s sociological analyses are still applicable in our studies of the developments that mark our troubled times. It does so through both global and local lenses, theoretically and empirically, and above all, by connecting past, present, and possible futures of all human societies.
Mangroves thrive in intertidal zones, where they gather organisms and objects from land, river, and ocean. They develop into complex ecologies in these dynamic in-between spaces. Mobilising resources drawn from semiotic materialism and the environmental humanities, this book seeks a form of social theory from the mangroves; that is to think interstitiality from the perspective of mangroves themselves, exploring the crafty and tenacious world-making they are engaged in. Three sections weave together theory, science and close observation, responding to calls within the environmental humanities for detailed attention to interactions in marginal spaces and those of interpretative tension. It exa...
"The Oxford Handbook of Political Participation provides readers with up-to-date knowledge on the wide-ranging topics covered in this field and considers the key theoretical and methodological pluralism in the area as well the most recent developments. One of the aims of this Handbook is to bring together two research traditions from political science and sociology, bridging research in political sociology and social movement studies. Accordingly, the Handbook mainly brings together authors coming from both the politics and sociology research traditions, as well as key authors working on political participation coming also from other fields such as psychology, economics, anthropology, and ge...
The history of sociology overwhelmingly focuses on 'the winners' from the classical 'canon' - Marx, Durkheim, and Weber - to today's most celebrated sociologists. This book strikingly demonstrates that restricting sociology in this way impoverishes it as a form of historically reflexive knowledge and obscures the processes and struggles of sociology's own making as a form of disciplinary knowledge. Sociological Amnesia focuses on singular contributions to sociology that were once considered central to the discipline but are today largely neglected. Chapters explore the work of illustrious predecessors such as Raymond Aron, Erich Fromm and G.D.H. Cole as well as examining exceptional cases of...
This book proposes a relational turn in higher education by conceptualizing knowledge and pedagogy as relational and multimodal, analyzed through three dimensions of relationality: social, technological, and environmental. The volume draws on interdisciplinary approaches that make a case for integrating these interconnected and distinct dimensions in higher education theory and practice. Its novelty lies in combining such a variety of perspectives with Peircean semiotics to explore what it means to learn and live relationally. It emphasizes the importance of critical reflection, rooted in an environmental understanding of knowledge and digital media. This approach integrates materiality, pla...
This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand “agency” as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and “structure” as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion.