Love As A Collective Action

This book makes evident how love, as an interstitial practice, produces a set of collective practices and how, through a mapping of these practices, it is possible to observe the connection between the politics of sensibilities and social conflict. The book provides – in the face of a global normalization of immediate enjoyment through consumption, the internationalization of fear and anxiety, the rise of "post-truth" and a distrust regarding politics – a systematic analysis of love as an interstitial practice. This book follows a sociology of body/emotions approaches within which sensations, emotions and sensibilities are part of dialectical social structuration process. The book proposes love not only as an effect or trait of a society, but also as an analytical tool for better understanding the processes of social structuring. It connects a sociology of bodies/emotions with a specific perspective on collective action and links conflictual structures and the politics of sensibilities in six Latin American countries by using a strategy of inquiry attuned to current patterns of social transformation, that of digital ethnography. This work is of interest to a wide public, those who want to know which emotions are the prevailing in Latin America, as well as specialists such as sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and all researchers and graduate students who are interested in the connections between conflict, society and emotions.

This books analyses the role of public opinion for generating genuine citizen demand for accountability, providing case studies from around the world to illustrate how public opinion forces governments to be accountable.

The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures explores stories about love that recuperate a vision of intimate life as a resource for creating bonds beyond heterosexual coupledom. This book offers a variety of ethical frames through which to understand changing definitions of love, intimacy, and interdependency in the context of struggles for marriage equality and the increasing recognition of post-nuclear forms of kinship and care. It commits to these post-nuclear arrangements, while pushing beyond the false choice between a politics of collective action and the celebration of deeply personal and incommunicable pleasures. In exploring the vicissitudes of love across contemporary philosophy, politics, film, new media, and literature, The Theory of Love: Ideals, Limits, Futures develops an original post-sentimental concept of love as a way to explain emergent intimacies and affiliations beyond the binary couple. This book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students across the humanities and social sciences, as well as being a teachable resource for undergraduate students. It will appeal to a wide range of academics and students in literary and film studies, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, and critical and cultural studies.

This, the second anthology of their writing, collects the Bad Subjects Collective's most interesting and provocative articles from the last six years. Covering diverse personal and political ground, the contributors explore cultural and media studies, racial identities, sexual politics, globalization, alternative communities, activism, the complexities of history, alternative consciousness and many other topics, in an incendiary mix of political radicalism and rigourous debate that's intended to provoke further discussion among academics and activists worldwide. Contributors include Doug Henwood, Richard D. Wolff, Annalee Newitz, Rick Prelinger, David Hawkes, Joel Schalit, Megan Shaw Prelinger, John Brady, Arturo Aldama, Joe Lockard, Jonathan Sterne, Charlie Bertsch, Mike Mosher, Cynthia Hoffman, Kim Nicolini, J.C. Myers, Scott Schaffer, Fred Aldama, Zach Furness, Elisabeth Hurst, Matt Wray, Tomas Sandoval and Viet Thanh Nguyen. 'Bad Subjects is a collective that seeks to revitalize progressive politics in retreat. We think too many people on the left have taken their convictions for granted. So we challenge progressive dogma by encouraging readers to think about the political dimension to all aspects of everyday life.' From the Bad Subjects manifesto

"Make kin, not babies!", Donna Haraway demands in an attempt to offer new and creative ways of thinking what kinship might mean in an age of ecological devastation. At the same time, the emergence of a seemingly new culture of public protest and political opinion have provoked scholars such as Judith Butler to address the contexts and dynamics of public collective action. This volume explores the dynamic relationship between structures of kinship and the (material) conditions under which collective action emerges from a literary and cultural studies perspective. How are kinship and collective action negotiated in literature, the arts, or in specific historical moments, and how does this affect the role of representation? How have conceptualizations of both concepts developed over time, and what can we infer from this for questions of kinship and collective action today?

In Collective Action and Exchange: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy, William D. Ferguson presents a comprehensive political economy text aimed at advanced undergraduates in economics and graduate students in the social sciences. The text utilizes collective action as a unifying concept, arguing that collective-action problems lie at the foundation of market success, market failure, economic development, and the motivations for policy. Ferguson draws on information economics, social preference theory, cognition theory, institutional economics, as well as political and policy theory to develop this approach. The text uses classical, evolutionary, and epistemic game theory, along with basic social network analysis, as modeling frameworks. These models effectively bind the ideas presented, generating a coherent theoretic approach to political economy that stresses sometimes overlooked implications.

This book unveils the concept of social love as a kind of "Karst River" that flows through the history of sociology, reassessing it as a form criticism by people in everyday life. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, this book offers both theoretical and empirical reflections on social love. It shows that love is not only central to the human experience, but that it can also help to interpret and intervene in social problems such as climate change, poverty, xenophobia, and the (post-)Covid crisis, recognizing people as actors in social change. It explores the idea of love as a key element in the promotion of solidarity and recognition in today’s plural and unequal societies. Based on empirical research on social love conducted through both qualitative and quantitative methods, especially in Europe and Latin America, this book explores the social dimension of love. Providing overviews on key questions and studies on current issues, the book is essential reference and resource for researchers, students, social workers, and professionals in social sciences, social philosophy, anthropology, social psychology, sociology of emotions and postmodern literature.

A rollicking debut novel set in a Scottish fast-food joint. Think Nick Hornby for the anti-globalization generation!