Category: Social Theory
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always primed with its own conditions of dissolution and abolishment
Interesting little essay here from one Duncan Stuart, a new name at Blue Labyrinths, which I will cite at length: [Sylvain] Lazarus takes seriously the work of French historian Marc Bloch, who argues in his 1949 book The Historians Craft, that the past is given and the future contingent. Lazarus demonstrates that for Bloch the…
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[a] question of how forgetting is avoided
Interesting aside here from Mark Carrigan, responding to (as he puts it) an “innocuous but in practice […] unsettling” observation in Nicholas Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow, which is a (surely rather premature?) analysis of the impact of coronavirus(es) on the way we live. Christakis observes that Covid-19 has sparked an awareness of public health challenges in…
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there is no transition
Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but seeing arguments for non-solutionist and demand-side approaches to decarbonisation research appearing in a journal from the Nature stable feels like a sign that the idea is getting some traction at long last. That said paper is by Elizabeth Shove, a brilliant and tenacious researcher whose work has been a huge…
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ecocultural theory top ten of the Teens
Not sure where I saw this one, but Adrian Ivakhiv has done a round-up of the ten best books on ecocultural theory of the Twentyteens. Fairly pleased to note that I’ve read two of them (both of which are actually in the top three—that’ll be Tsing’s Mushroom and Saint Donna’s Staying With the Trouble, for…
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Lana Swartz, payment as media
I watched this LCC guest lecture by Lana Swartz as a livestream about a month back, and glad to see it’s finally made its way out to public availability. The basic argument is right there in the title of this post—payment as media—but I wholeheartedly recommend anyone with an interest in the usual theoretical thematics…