The Shoah and the Nakba
Going forward, any artist or writer or curator who creates a film or book or work of art or museum exhibit aimed at the general public that treats the Holocaust in isolation is artistically and morally bankrupt.
The Practical Theorist
Thinking out loud about theory and social transformation.
Latest posts
Why Trump Was Elected
The two basic strategies open to America are to behave more cooperatively with others in the short term, hoping to gain back his dominance in the long term, or, conversely, to be more ruthlessly assertive in the short term, more openly than he has been even at the height of his power. New forms of cooperation, or new forms of aggression. Two opposite strategies, both involving adaptation and new…
The Humiliations of Privilege
I m a white cishet normatively abled male from an upper middle-class background. Privileged according to most or all of the dimensions of intersectionality analysis. Awareness of this privilege brings me shame in several ways. Obviously there is the shame in being implicated, however unintentionally, in the oppression of others. But more interesting, from a sociological
The Paradox of Universalism
The path to universality is through particularity.
The Contingency of Categories
If a certain way of thinking appears self-evident to us, this is no evidence of the truth of that way of thinking.
Committing Sociology in the Age of Post-Truth Politics
Knowledge can never truly “be apolitical”. No matter what the political climate, sociology needs to make itself useful. Of course, to whom it should make itself useful, and to what ends, and how — these are crucial questions.
How Postmodernism Predicted Post-Truth Politics
Science faces a legitimation crisis because the metanarratives which formerly sustained it have lost their appeal.
Movies as Ideology
Almost all widely distributed movies are either capitalist fantasies or aristocratic fantasies.
Everyday Relativism
One shifts from an argument to a negotiation. Negotiations do not require epistemic consensus. Both parties can remain different.
What Relativism Does Not Do
relativism does not prevent us from making assertions; it only changes how we understand "what it is that we are doing" when we make assertions.