Pub Date : 2023-09-13DOI: 10.1177/07255136231199829
Jokubas Salyga
The books under review exemplify some of the finest recent work on the historically informed political economy of Central and Eastern Europe. While different in their conceptual frameworks and geographical foci, the titles converge in the advancement of nuanced and convincing arguments, displaying both theoretical acuity and empirical depth to great effect. Bartel, Fabry, and Pula all share a resolute dedication to illuminating the under-explored provenances of neoliberalism and/or globalization in the region, that predate the annus mirabilis of 1989. Their contributions situate the ‘Eastern bloc’ states within the contours of evolving global political economy and the existential crises engulfing capitalism and ‘actually existing socialism’ during the 1970s and beyond. The authors expound on the intricate web of global capital accumulation, geopolitical competition, and skilful diplomatic strategy, which served to dismantle the ‘Iron Curtain’. Two contributions further assess the postscripts of the 1989 revolutions.
{"title":"The Provenances and Postscripts of 1989","authors":"Jokubas Salyga","doi":"10.1177/07255136231199829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231199829","url":null,"abstract":"The books under review exemplify some of the finest recent work on the historically informed political economy of Central and Eastern Europe. While different in their conceptual frameworks and geographical foci, the titles converge in the advancement of nuanced and convincing arguments, displaying both theoretical acuity and empirical depth to great effect. Bartel, Fabry, and Pula all share a resolute dedication to illuminating the under-explored provenances of neoliberalism and/or globalization in the region, that predate the annus mirabilis of 1989. Their contributions situate the ‘Eastern bloc’ states within the contours of evolving global political economy and the existential crises engulfing capitalism and ‘actually existing socialism’ during the 1970s and beyond. The authors expound on the intricate web of global capital accumulation, geopolitical competition, and skilful diplomatic strategy, which served to dismantle the ‘Iron Curtain’. Two contributions further assess the postscripts of the 1989 revolutions.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135740430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188189
M. Wieviorka
Written while the pandemic was still a key issue, this article tries to imagine the post-pandemic from different perspectives, and first of all in distinct temporalities. A question arises immediately: how can we consider the hypothesis of a deep cultural or anthropological mutation with intellectual or scientific tools that were forged before this mutation? What might new approaches for the social sciences look like? The article proceeds to analyse the more obvious social, technological and cultural changes that occurred with the pandemic, which definitively modify our perception and understanding of globalisation. New or renewed inequalities, intergenerational tensions, racism, increasing fake news and conspiracy theory visions of the world, but also issues raised by feminism or ecology are at stake here.
{"title":"Eleven theses or hypotheses on the way out of the pandemic","authors":"M. Wieviorka","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188189","url":null,"abstract":"Written while the pandemic was still a key issue, this article tries to imagine the post-pandemic from different perspectives, and first of all in distinct temporalities. A question arises immediately: how can we consider the hypothesis of a deep cultural or anthropological mutation with intellectual or scientific tools that were forged before this mutation? What might new approaches for the social sciences look like? The article proceeds to analyse the more obvious social, technological and cultural changes that occurred with the pandemic, which definitively modify our perception and understanding of globalisation. New or renewed inequalities, intergenerational tensions, racism, increasing fake news and conspiracy theory visions of the world, but also issues raised by feminism or ecology are at stake here.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"6 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49651244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231198536
Jeffrey C Alexander
Written in the early months of the COVID pandemic, and in the midst of the second wave of Black Lives Matters protest, this article suggests that Americans experienced these shocking social events as a double-whammy cultural trauma, as deeply troubling to their collective identity as nation. How the trauma played out would determine the near-term future of American politics. Were the poor and non-white the principal victims of the double whammy, or were white Americans and the ‘hard-working middle class’ actually the injured parties? Who was the trauma’s perpetrator? Was it China, inadequate healthcare, government bureaucracy, or Trump and ‘know-nothing’ populism? The performances that provided the most felicitous answers to such questions would determine whether the country moved to the left or the right in the months before the Presidential election that would take place before year’s end.
{"title":"The double-whammy trauma: Narrative and counter-narrative during COVID–Floyd","authors":"Jeffrey C Alexander","doi":"10.1177/07255136231198536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231198536","url":null,"abstract":"Written in the early months of the COVID pandemic, and in the midst of the second wave of Black Lives Matters protest, this article suggests that Americans experienced these shocking social events as a double-whammy cultural trauma, as deeply troubling to their collective identity as nation. How the trauma played out would determine the near-term future of American politics. Were the poor and non-white the principal victims of the double whammy, or were white Americans and the ‘hard-working middle class’ actually the injured parties? Who was the trauma’s perpetrator? Was it China, inadequate healthcare, government bureaucracy, or Trump and ‘know-nothing’ populism? The performances that provided the most felicitous answers to such questions would determine whether the country moved to the left or the right in the months before the Presidential election that would take place before year’s end.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"64 - 70"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42869034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188180
P. Wagner
Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article reviews the question of the lasting socio-political significance of the appearance of the virus, much and controversially debated at the beginning. We can see now – maybe rather unsurprisingly – that the expectations of rapid pandemic-related social change, whether positive or negative, were widely exaggerated. Rather, the pandemic has now entered into an interpretation of the global socio-political constellation as marked by a sequence of crises, including the financial crisis of 2008 and after, climate change, COVID-19 and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the task can be rephrased as asking whether these crises push into a similar direction, namely a re-appreciation of authoritative collective action against the laissez-faire view of extending global commerce and communication and, if so, what the consequences of such a re-appreciation may be.
{"title":"The lasting significance of viruses: COVID-19, historical moments and social transformations","authors":"P. Wagner","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188180","url":null,"abstract":"Three years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this article reviews the question of the lasting socio-political significance of the appearance of the virus, much and controversially debated at the beginning. We can see now – maybe rather unsurprisingly – that the expectations of rapid pandemic-related social change, whether positive or negative, were widely exaggerated. Rather, the pandemic has now entered into an interpretation of the global socio-political constellation as marked by a sequence of crises, including the financial crisis of 2008 and after, climate change, COVID-19 and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the task can be rephrased as asking whether these crises push into a similar direction, namely a re-appreciation of authoritative collective action against the laissez-faire view of extending global commerce and communication and, if so, what the consequences of such a re-appreciation may be.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"122 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43579323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188170
Timothy Andrews
Written during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, this short essay reflects on a changing world in the midst of major upheaval. Bringing together the philosophical thought of the late Agnes Heller with the historical meditations expressed in Virginia Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts, the essay attends to the ways that historical transition plays out in the everyday. Writing on the cusp of the Second World War, Woolf is acutely aware of an atmosphere of historical change, and she writes this unease into the everyday transitions of her characters and ambience of the novel. Drawing on Heller’s reflections on notions of home, I consider how our experience of everyday life reflects the undulations of history. Taking Woolf’s prompt, I tune into the ways that the unease of historical transition enters the everyday through a heightened awareness of contingency and growing sense of the uncanny.
{"title":"Between the acts: At home in uncertain times","authors":"Timothy Andrews","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188170","url":null,"abstract":"Written during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, this short essay reflects on a changing world in the midst of major upheaval. Bringing together the philosophical thought of the late Agnes Heller with the historical meditations expressed in Virginia Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts, the essay attends to the ways that historical transition plays out in the everyday. Writing on the cusp of the Second World War, Woolf is acutely aware of an atmosphere of historical change, and she writes this unease into the everyday transitions of her characters and ambience of the novel. Drawing on Heller’s reflections on notions of home, I consider how our experience of everyday life reflects the undulations of history. Taking Woolf’s prompt, I tune into the ways that the unease of historical transition enters the everyday through a heightened awareness of contingency and growing sense of the uncanny.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"15 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47525099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231195110
Alex Oelofse
Cape Town is a city of astonishing beauty and contradiction. It is tough, beautiful, relaxed and edgy in different proportions. Or at least, these are some of the impressions it might give to outsiders. Nestled in that wonderful vista of Lion’s Head and Table Mountain, stretching from surf to mountain scarp, it still combines the architecture of mixed modernity, from the Company Gardens to downtown marinas and mirror glass. If your trail takes you to Stellenbosch, as ours did when we lived nearby, you drive through/past Khayelitsha, the informal housing that stretches for miles of tin, PVC and satellite dishes, and shebeens across the flatlands by the airport. A little further out there is the dormitory beach suburb of Strand and the dramatically segregated features of Somerset West, black one side of the freeway, white the other. As Ivan Vladislavić and others have observed, the history of place in this place can be read from its concrete divisions, Architecture After Apartheid and then post-apartheid. As Alex Oelofse shows in these remarkable photos, the natural beauty and colonial legacy is now framed from a height by the concrete grid first imposed by the apartheid state, and that which follows. Cape Town is a mobile city; walking, driving for those lucky enough to take safety in the refuge of their wheeled metal capsules, riding more perilously hanging on the back of a truck for the black urban poor, or pushing bicycles; the city thrives on activity. In these stills it is in fact still; the absence of actors, however defined and marked, is gobsmacking. The state-sanctioned lockdown confined the population indoors, or into hiding, living the radical diversity of lives that they otherwise would, in Cape Town, in isolation or proximity, falling ill and dying differentially. The god’s eye view by drone of this austere beauty leaves us wondering, in awe, of how life goes on the ground, and when it might return to its own version of normal. The concrete desire lines viewed from above make us long for the energy and pulse that run along the ground. We are grateful to Alex for his work, and for sharing it with us and our readers.
{"title":"Photography – Empty desire lines: Cape Town under lockdown","authors":"Alex Oelofse","doi":"10.1177/07255136231195110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231195110","url":null,"abstract":"Cape Town is a city of astonishing beauty and contradiction. It is tough, beautiful, relaxed and edgy in different proportions. Or at least, these are some of the impressions it might give to outsiders. Nestled in that wonderful vista of Lion’s Head and Table Mountain, stretching from surf to mountain scarp, it still combines the architecture of mixed modernity, from the Company Gardens to downtown marinas and mirror glass. If your trail takes you to Stellenbosch, as ours did when we lived nearby, you drive through/past Khayelitsha, the informal housing that stretches for miles of tin, PVC and satellite dishes, and shebeens across the flatlands by the airport. A little further out there is the dormitory beach suburb of Strand and the dramatically segregated features of Somerset West, black one side of the freeway, white the other. As Ivan Vladislavić and others have observed, the history of place in this place can be read from its concrete divisions, Architecture After Apartheid and then post-apartheid. As Alex Oelofse shows in these remarkable photos, the natural beauty and colonial legacy is now framed from a height by the concrete grid first imposed by the apartheid state, and that which follows. Cape Town is a mobile city; walking, driving for those lucky enough to take safety in the refuge of their wheeled metal capsules, riding more perilously hanging on the back of a truck for the black urban poor, or pushing bicycles; the city thrives on activity. In these stills it is in fact still; the absence of actors, however defined and marked, is gobsmacking. The state-sanctioned lockdown confined the population indoors, or into hiding, living the radical diversity of lives that they otherwise would, in Cape Town, in isolation or proximity, falling ill and dying differentially. The god’s eye view by drone of this austere beauty leaves us wondering, in awe, of how life goes on the ground, and when it might return to its own version of normal. The concrete desire lines viewed from above make us long for the energy and pulse that run along the ground. We are grateful to Alex for his work, and for sharing it with us and our readers.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"133 - 139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41940019","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231188175
Beth Vale
Queues have been at the centre of South Africa’s COVID-19 story. National lockdown was declared on 26 March 2020, around the time ‘month-end’ salaries and government grants are paid out. Within the first few days, reports came of the long lines outside banks and supermarkets, with journalists regularly citing people’s failure to ‘social distance’. This article uses the queue as an analytic tool to explore the unequal vulnerabilities entailed in the experience of COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa.
{"title":"The virus in the queues","authors":"Beth Vale","doi":"10.1177/07255136231188175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231188175","url":null,"abstract":"Queues have been at the centre of South Africa’s COVID-19 story. National lockdown was declared on 26 March 2020, around the time ‘month-end’ salaries and government grants are paid out. Within the first few days, reports came of the long lines outside banks and supermarkets, with journalists regularly citing people’s failure to ‘social distance’. This article uses the queue as an analytic tool to explore the unequal vulnerabilities entailed in the experience of COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"117 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43068170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231195139
Eric Ferris
{"title":"Book review: Capitalism versus Democracy? Rethinking Politics in the Age of Environmental Crisis","authors":"Eric Ferris","doi":"10.1177/07255136231195139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231195139","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"140 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41922491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231186643
Howard Prosser
This essay is a reflection on Albert Camus’s revival during the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. The popularity of Camus’s novel, The Plague, is considered alongside his other writing as something that speaks to many throughout their lives. Such appraisal is interspersed with personal reflections on family life during pandemic lockdowns and the ways that Camus’s thought resounds in our everyday selves. Written in two parts at different times – mainly in 2020 and with a 2023 afterthought – the essay critically acknowledges how Camus instructs us to live together with meaning and dignity in an age of catastrophe.
{"title":"A void like the plague: Fragments of domestic theory","authors":"Howard Prosser","doi":"10.1177/07255136231186643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231186643","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is a reflection on Albert Camus’s revival during the COVID-19 pandemic of the early 2020s. The popularity of Camus’s novel, The Plague, is considered alongside his other writing as something that speaks to many throughout their lives. Such appraisal is interspersed with personal reflections on family life during pandemic lockdowns and the ways that Camus’s thought resounds in our everyday selves. Written in two parts at different times – mainly in 2020 and with a 2023 afterthought – the essay critically acknowledges how Camus instructs us to live together with meaning and dignity in an age of catastrophe.","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"20 - 27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44834327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/07255136231194795
Peter Beilharz, Sian Supski
{"title":"Introduction to COVID special issue","authors":"Peter Beilharz, Sian Supski","doi":"10.1177/07255136231194795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231194795","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":54188,"journal":{"name":"Thesis Eleven","volume":"177 1","pages":"3 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：