Description
Book SynopsisIn Planetary Sociology: Beyond the Entanglement of Identity and Social Structure, Harry F. Dahms gathers a team of interdisciplinary junior social scientists who examine their individual identity as being shaped by specific social contexts such as nationality, class, and race, to scrutinize how their interests as social scientists are responses to such contexts and culturally specific circumstances (Part II). Acknowledging the limits of economic, organizational, and technological modernization at the national level, planetary sociology delineates the type of critical social, political, cultural, and environmental reflexivity required for "progress," "health," and "development" to be meaningful categories.
Including contributions from senior scholars in the field who do not rely on the paradigm of planetary Sociology (Part III), this volume of Current Perspectives in Social Theory illustrates the importance of scrutinizing links between individual identity and social structure, without employing the paradigm of planetary sociology. Taken together, the chapters in this volume are essential reading for both undergraduate and graduate students eager to understand a rigorous social-research mindset, along with professionalization, methodology, and theoretical orientation, and related applications. Presenting an opportunity for social theorists and social scientists to learn about the challenges faced by younger sociologists, the examples of "applied theory" included here emphasize the importance of critical self-reflexivity in and for the 21st century, and the challenges it represents to social scientists, theorists, researchers, and teachers.
Table of ContentsPart I. Introducing Planetary Sociology
Introduction: Navigating the Tensions between Self and Society; Harry F. Dahms
Chapter 1. Planetary Sociology as a New Paradigm: Disentangling Identity Structure and Social Structure (or, Toward a More Resolute Enlightenment); Harry F. Dahms
Part II. Planetary Sociology: Contrubtions and Applications
Chapter 2. Critical Socioanalysis and the Critique of Religion, or, Why I Read Theory: Gloria Anzaldúa, Jacques Lacan, and Memories of Latin America; Joel M. Crombez
Chapter 3. “Dirty Mourning”: Appalachia, Identity, and Planetary Sociology; Bethany Nelson
Chapter 4. The Authoritarian Personality in White Middle-Class Suburbia: A Planetary Sociology of Trumpism and Me; Stelios Alfonso Panageotou
Chapter 5. The Futility of Human Capital? Contradictions of “Neoliberal Ethics,” Heteronomy, and Automation; Anthony J. Knowles
Chapter 6. Between Habit and Innovation: Social Construction of the Self and Systems for a Planetary Sociology; Emily M. Landry
Chapter 7. A Planetary Political Ecology for Relict Species: The Abandonment of Societies and Environments; Thomas F. Bechtold
Chapter 8. Opposing the Binary: Blurring the Lines of Gender and Sexual Identity for Planetary Sociology; Rachel A. Ponder
Chapter 9. Working through the Past: Punishment, Accountability, and Transformation within Self and Structure; Vivian Swayne
Chapter 10. "In the sweet by and by": Living in the Space between as an Insider/Outsider of Evangelical Christianity; Della Winters
Part III. Intersections of Identity Structure and Social Structure
Chapter 11. The Missing Factor in Critical Global Studies: Indigenous Knowledge; Asafa Jalata
Chapter 12. Allegory, Discourse, and Truth: The Ontological Grounding of Social Being; Reha Kadakal
Chapter 13. A Theory of Despair among U.S. College Students; Joseph C. Hermanowicz
Chapter 14. Adorno, Luhmann and the Critique of Identity: Some Internal Connections; Laurindo Dias Minhoto and Lucas Fucci Amato
