Critical Sociology

Efforts to build stable states in Africa have often been conditioned by ideological and policy debates about the right approach for enhancing freedom and social wellbeing. Since independence, African countries have experimented with unorthodox variants of liberalism and socialism. However, neither of these has enhanced African states. This article examines the shift from orthodox neoliberalism in the international approach to state-building in Africa and raises questions about the feasibility of an international development approach that fuses neoliberalism with a human development approach. The article advances the notion of people-centered liberalism as the latest approach to international state-building in war-torn African countries. It uses the internationally-driven postwar reconstruction plans for Sierra Leone and Liberia to demonstrate people-centered liberalism.

While scholars have shown how ‘color-blind racism’ functions as the dominant form of racist discourse in the post-Civil Rights era, few have interrogated how this logic operated before the advent of US Civil Rights, or how ethno-racial groups such as Puerto Ricans exist in an unique and liminal position and have been subject to color-blind racist discourse. The authors explore the construction of Puerto Rican identity during the pre-Civil Rights: a time rife with color-blind American paternalism over the supposed cultural dysfunctions of the Puerto Rican diaspora, an era of mass Puerto Rican emigration to the US, and a moment when Puerto Rico underwent a political change. The authors employ a content analysis of The New York Times (1948 to 1958) in order to investigate the relationship between the discursive construction of Puerto Rican identity and the flagship newspaper’s use of nationalist and racialized cultural schemata.

A major component of the online pro-eating disorder culture (‘pro-ana’ and ‘pro-mia’) is what is referred to as ‘thinspiration’ or ‘thinspo’, which consists of images, slogans and videos aimed at inspiring the pursuit of extreme thinness. More recently, there is a specific kind of thinspiration, labeled online as ‘black girl thinspiration’, that seeks to inspire black women to reject fuller-figured body shapes as beautiful and responsible. Through the application of a spatial analysis, I contend that pro-eating disorder environments are spaces where women attempt to de-mark their racialized bodies through hard work, will-power and mastery over their desires. Theorizing from critical race and feminist postmodern perspectives, this article disrupts the white hegemony and privilege of the thin ideal. This disruption is achieved through unmapping how modern capitalism, sexism, and racism operate in unison to produce women who starve, purge, abuse laxatives and hate their bodies, while highlighting the tremendous violence embedded in these practices.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the two assessments of subjective placement in the social structure – class identification and subjective social placement – in a top-to-bottom social hierarchy. In this article, the focus is on the association between working-class identity and subjective social placement. The source material is derived from the International Social Survey Programme from 2009 and 2012. The analysis reveals that women who identified with the working class to a higher extent located themselves towards the lower strata compared to their male counterparts, a result indicating that the female class structure may be more polarized than that of males. The results imply a need for more research concerning how women and men relate their objective class position to social status, as well as the relationship to different outcomes, such as subjective well-being and social justice.

In a global knowledge economy, western nations compete for the best knowledge workers, while positioning English language and western education as superior. Drawing from critical theories of globalization, we argue that the international education field has become a site to maintain a neo-imperial agenda concealed by a neoliberal rhetoric of progress and economic expediency. Using Canada as a case study, we critically examine the global tactics of power and governance strategies in international education policy, as they influence and shape education and immigration policy within Canada. We illustrate how the OECD positions itself for global dominance in education and (re)produces the international education field using tactics such as rescaling, the policy cycle and ‘self-responsibilizing’ students. This process creates and maintains a global market for knowledge producers and expands the soft power of western nations.

This article contributes to the discussion about the process of relocation of industrial production. The study focuses on a community in Eastern Europe which witnessed a cycle of events: from localization of a high-scale global factory in 2007 to its unexpected displacement in 2012. In this study is analyzed the process of the community’s inclusion in the production system, and it is argued that the challenge of production mobility is distinctively different in middle-income economies. Employing a cultural approach to the study of global production, the process of social reconstruction caused by the investment is chronologically outlined and its outcomes for the local labor market and host community are described.

What are the methods and goals of radical history? How can Marxist historiography, charged with producing radical histories, contend with the postmodernist challenge that knowledge is always mediated, that only fragments are recoverable, not totalities? Working through concepts and methods associated with postcolonial literary studies and subaltern studies, the article analyzes a document in the British colonial archives from the time of the 1857 Revolt in India that challenges both nationalist and imperialist histories of its most famous rebel: Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi. Understanding mediation and the limits of knowledge – the fissures and conflicts among colonial officials, the ambiguity of the queen’s intentions – are crucial to understanding this file, and the 1857 Revolt itself. But Marxist historiography must also link that text – mediated and complex as it is – to the world outside of the archive, and seek explanatory frameworks and adequate truths in the effort to produce radical histories.

This article criticizes the negative impact of productivism on disabled people of working age in the postsocialist region of Central and Eastern Europe. Productivism is conceptualized as a mechanism that generates cultural and material invalidation of those considered to be unable to work. The analysis begins by outlining some political-economic features of state socialism that underpinned its productivism, emphasizing commodification of labor. It proceeds by discussing the ensuing approach to social policy, comparing it with two alternative models. Afterwards, it highlights several ways in which productivism shaped disability policy in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Finally, the analysis looks at present-day disability policy in the postsocialist region. It is argued that after 1989, the state-based productivism of the socialist regime was partially complemented and partially displaced by the market-based productivism of the new neoliberal regime. The conclusion discusses strategies for resisting productivism, focusing specifically on decommodification of labor.

Scholars of contemporary capitalism have argued that the rise of flexible accumulation and precarious employment has left workers disillusioned and adrift, experiencing an erosion of solidarities and human bonds. In contrast, this study uncovers a sense of collective efficacy where existing scholarship would lead us to least expect it: among workers who are, structurally, among the most marginal and vulnerable. The case examined is a Chicago living wage campaign, which for three long years mobilized workers laboring outside of traditional employment relationships. Why would a sense of collective efficacy emerge when participants’ ability to make change had remained in doubt for years? Why would workers who lack structural power come to feel so efficacious? Drawing on in-depth interviews with campaign participants, I argue that their understandings of power arose from their experience of collective action. The case sheds new light on our understanding of identity and subjectivity under contemporary capitalism.

This article focuses on the links and interdependences between new trends in post-Fordist globalization and the current direction of migration flows and migrants’ projects in Italy. On the one hand, thousands of migrants are arriving as stowaways or asylum seekers due to political and economic tensions from the Syrian crisis and elsewhere in the Arab world. At the same time, an increasing number of highly-skilled youths are leaving Italy in order to seek insertion in more dynamic knowledge-based economies. Informed by Foucault’s approach to biopolitics, this work critically considers the ‘complementary heterogeneity’ of these migratory flows as a focal point and examines them in the structural context produced by the post-2007 crisis.

This article illustrates the phenomenon of migration as a key for analyzing neoliberal as well as Keynesian logic. The European socio-economic frame of integration is defined as a four-fold complex consisting of an employment regime (types of labor markets), forms of consumption, a system of social protection, and a type of socio-political integration. It is shown that the articulation of these four levels produces virtuoso or perverse cycles of social integration. Using official data, it can be seen that the Spanish labor market has suffered structural changes since the post-2007 economic crisis, including alteration in work activities, occupations and the unemployment level of the labor force; deterioration for specific groups such as young people and immigrants; and increased risk of poverty. With the deepening of the crisis, immigrants have found themselves trapped in Spain’s network of unemployment, temporary employment, lack of stable employment prospects, irregular economics, increased risk of poverty, and a perverse cycle of exclusion that calls into question not only the effectiveness of European neoliberal policies but the entire European social model.

This paper uses Chela Sandoval’s (2000) concept of meta-ideologizing to examine how definitions of ‘access’ are reframed to further the goals of social justice activists. Meta-ideologizing refers to re-operationalizing liberal, widely-accepted terms to fit the needs of a community. The paper draws from 14 semi-structured interviews with individuals pivotal to the passing and implementation of Toronto’s ‘Students Without Legal Immigration Status Policy’, also known as a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. It also employs data from literature developed by stakeholders as well as the author’s experiential knowledge. It examines how organizers have reframed the concept of ‘access’ by extending its focus beyond entry into schools and including the need for undocumented migrants to be safe and have access to other social services. It also analyzes the ways bureaucratic logic can invisibilize the gains made by developing procedures that reify illegalization.

This article aims to study the collective strategies and social networks of young Spanish emigrants in the European Union, paying special attention to their perceptions of and practices regarding working conditions, as well as their relationships with the trade unions and social movements. The article focuses on two case studies of migrant self-organisation networks: the Union Action Group of Berlin, Germany and the Solidarity Federation in Brighton, UK. On the basis of semi-structured interviews and document analysis, the article concludes that the existing gap between trade unions and migrant labour can, under certain circumstances, favour the emergence of solidarity networks which in part play the role of trade unions. We call this type of organisation interstitial trade unionism.