• Magazine of the International Sociological Association
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Open Access, Predatory Journals or Subscription-Based Journals

by Sujata Patel

GD 13.2

Recently, a colleague from a European university asked me to contribute an article for a special issue on sociological theory in an English-language open-access journal that she edits. I had not heard of the journal but agreed immediately given that it would mean that if published (after reviews), the paper could potentially be read around the world. This would overcome the circulation bottleneck that exists today in flows of professional knowledge which are dominated by journal subscriptions and article payments. As we all know, subscriptions and article processing payments are not subsidized...

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13.2
3 issues a year in multiple languages

Latest Issue. GD 13.2, August 2023

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For a Better Health Seeking Behavior in Bihar, India

GD 13.2

The conditions posed by Covid-19 meant that behavioral changes became the norm to control the spread of the virus in any community. Governments decreed lockdowns several times and kept advising people to physically distance, self-isolate, home quarantine, use a mask and gloves in public places, wash their hands frequently, etc. Despite such efforts, the Indian government was unable to control the situation as the majority of the population in India, as constantly reported in popular media, was not adhering to the guidelines and more importantly was not willing to be tested for the virus. Also ...

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The Mental Health Crisis in Spain: Why Sociology Matters

GD 13.2

While current mental health interventions are usually placed within the realm of healthcare and thus deemed to be within the system, mental health forms part of the lifeworld and is integrated into one’s culture, social relations, and personality. Sociology has much to offer to better understand mental health and distress. Here, I advocate a greater role for sociology when addressing these issues by suggesting that we have been witnessing disturbances in cultural reproduction and social integration. These are manifested as a loss of cultural orientation, alienation, and...

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Expanding Human Rights Discourse by Recognizing Subliminal Violence

GD 13.2

The human rights paradigm is a deeply empathetic manner of looking at the world. It is predicated on the fundamental assumption that human life is worthy and invested with dignity and meaning. The paradigm has evolved structurally, drawing on the learnings of atrocities that women and men have suffered across history. However, like every paradigm, it arose within a historical context; in this case, one dominated by the intellectual currents of legal positivism and individualism that privileged objective empiricism and the disembodied individual as the subject matter. The time has come to enrich...

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The Russian Invasion of Ukraine from a Khaldunian Perspective

GD 13.2

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was a Muslim scholar and politician who has received much attention in the social sciences globally. His interdisciplinary work made invaluable contributions to the fields of economics, finance, urban studies, human geography, history, political theory, conflict studies, philosophy, and international relations, to name just a few. His writing, al-Muqaddimah/Prolegomenon and Kitb al-‘Ibar/History of Ibn Khaldun, first appeared in the West in French in 1697, in Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale. Today ...

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Women in the Making of Social Theory Beyond the Canon

GD 13.2

In 1838, Harriet Martineau defended the creation of rules for producing “safe generalizations” about societies. Almost six decades before the release of Émile Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method, Martineau published How to Observe Morals and Manners, an exquisite work on the epistemological challenges involved in the production of knowledge about human beings and their interrelationships. Martineau imagined the social as a domain in which institutions, material life, symbols, feelings, bodies, and demographic factors intertwined. Like...

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Doing Anti-Colonial Social Theory

GD 13.2

Anti-colonial social theory draws its approach from a critical understanding of anti-colonial thought which grew and spread across the world through anti-colonial social movements. Anti-colonial thought assesses, in various ways, the constitution of hierarchies and domination/hegemony in colonial territories and thus is a proto-sociological analysis of the roles and interventions of “native” groups against colonialism. In order to do this, anti-colonial thought defines a method to debunk received ideas, principles, and assumptions that naturalize colonial domination within the colony and historizes the way such dominant/hegemonic knowledge grew in the colonizing countries. Additionally, it assumes that colonialism is a historical watershed and a marker of capitalist exploitation...

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Theory and (the End of) Practice

GD 13.2

Some of the most influential trends in contemporary sociology have converged around the concept of practice (Schatzki et al. 2000). To be sure, their novelty does not lie in the focus on this theme itself. In the long-standing debates on agency and structure that marked mid-twentieth-century sociology, this concept played a central role and already involved a shift from the meaning that “praxis” had in Marxism. Rather than pointing towards forms of revolutionary action to be carried out by the proletariat, theorists like Bourdieu or Giddens regarded practice in more politically modest...

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After Grand Theory: Fieldwork in Philosophy?

GD 13.2

It is a commonplace that something noteworthy has happened to “social theory” in recent decades. Views differ, however, concerning what exactly has happened and how the situation should be assessed. From mid-century “grand theory” to end-of-century “studies” Defenders of “theory” have been heard to lament that the social sciences have been taken over by myriad empirical studies, with little ambition to say something more general about society and no capacity to provide research with new substantive tools or perspectives ...

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Let’s Do Free-Spirited Sociology!

GD 13.2

“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” This famous quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, who without doubt epitomizes the very idea of genius. Whoever said it pinpointed the indispensability of intuition: to keep going without continuous questioning of what you are doing; to open up for undisciplined, informal thinking; to trust your capacity to attain something of interest without evident rational thought and decision-making. When you think about it, you cannot come up with something novel through critical thinking only, can you? Creative...

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