Human Rights As Political Imaginary

In this book, López proposes the ‘political imaginary’ model as a tool to better understand what human rights are in practice, and what they might, or might not, be able to achieve. Human rights are conceptualised as assemblages of relatively stable, but not unchanging, historically situated, and socially embedded practices. Drawing on an emerging iconoclastic historiography of human rights, the author provides a sympathetic yet critical overview of the field of the sociology of human rights. The book addresses debates regarding sociology’s relationships to human rights, the strengths and limits of the notion of practice, human rights’ affinity to postnational citizenship and cosmopolitism, and human rights’ curious, yet fateful, entanglement with the law. Human Rights as Political Imaginary will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, politics, international relations and criminology.

This book develops a performative and relational approach to gendered and sexualised bodies conceived as distinct from the more limited individualistic idea of sexual identity and orientation that is at play within notions of progress in contemporary transnational sexual politics. Focusing on the psychosocial dimension of sexual life, Sabsay challenges accepted ideas of increased emancipation, and the steady extension of rights, offering instead a critique of the liberal imaginary that is at the base of the sexual rights-bearing subject. The book offers a notion of sexual embodiment that provides an alternative to individualism, one that is social, radically relational and psychically divided, and that implies a different conception of democratic sexual politics for our time.This book brings together political and cultural analysis of sexual rights discourse with a strong theory of the relational subject whose political investments and articulations depend on a political imaginary. This is a highly original and methodical text which will be of particular interest to academics and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, sociology, politics and psychology.

This book addresses the ways in which a range of representational forms have influenced and helped implement the project of human rights across the world, and seeks to show how public discourses on law and politics grow out of and are influenced by the imaginative representations of human rights. It draws on a multi-disciplinary approach, using historical, literary, anthropological, visual arts, and media studies methods and readings, and covers a wider range of geographic areas than has previously been attempted. A series of specifically-commissioned essays by leading scholars in the field and by emerging young academics show how a multidisciplinary approach can illuminate this central concern.

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory’s current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism and the wider ‘practical turn’, the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary’s reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation’s injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history.

Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.

Re-Imagining Relationships in Education re-imagines relationships in contemporary education by bringing state-of-the-art theoretical and philosophical insights to bear on current teaching practices. Introduces theories based on various philosophical approaches into the realm of student teacher relationships Opens up innovative ways to think about teaching and new kinds of questions that can be raised Features a broad range of philosophical approaches that include Arendt, Beckett, Irigaray and Wollstonecraft to name but a few Includes contributors from Norway, England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, and the U.S.

This Research Handbook takes stock of the state of the art in sociological research on globalization and the contributors outline future trajectories for this, one of the most pressing and challenging sociological themes of our time.

Bringing together contributions from an international group of social scientists, this collection examines diverse crises, both historical and contemporary, which implicate market forces, widening inequalities, social exclusion, forms of resistance, and ideological polarisation. The Commonalities of Global Crises offers carefully researched case studies which stretch across large geographical distances- from Egypt to the US and from northern, central, eastern and southern Europe to South America- and covers timely issues including human rights, slavery, care, migration, racism, and the far right. The volume demonstrates that such different settings and diverse concerns are characterized by a common tension in which the crises that unfold around pressures of widening marketization and commodification are met by the (re)building or re-assertion of various communities, and competing politics of solidarity and nostalgia.