Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> To be effective, the battle against COVID-19 and other pandemics must address the social dimensions of the crisis. The objective of this study was to assess whether negative attitudes toward elite knowledge were associated with vaccine hesitancy in the United States during COVID-19. Attitudes toward elite knowledge were assessed using three measures: (a) the Epistemological Style Inventory’s ‘naive realism’ subscale, (b) a measure about supporting education to foster understanding of politics, and (c) a populism scale. Vaccine hesitancy was measured using a 9-item adaptation of the Vaccine Hesitancy Scale used by the World Health Organization. Multiple regression results revealed that naïve realism (.184, p &lt; .001) and populism (.356, p &lt; .001) were positively associated with vaccine hesitancy, while support of political education (−.296, p &lt; .001) was negatively associated with vaccine hesitancy. These results indicate that to fully understand vaccine hesitancy, the role of attitudes toward elite knowledge must be considered. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The article takes into exam the current literature about Big Data and data capitalism, from the perspective of the critical Internet theory. Particular attention will be placed to the ideas of data exploitation and raw data, which will prove to betray a form of digital fetishism: in short, the focus on the final results of the production process, rather than on the social relations by which the very same process is fueled. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Michel Freitag developed a ground-breaking sociological theory synthesizing the thought of sociology’s founders into the form of a dialectical sociology that conceives of the symbolic as ontological to social reality. After outlining his conceptualization of the historical evolution of society through its ‘modes of reproduction’, we will see how his analysis of contemporary societal transformations rests on a critical theory of communication and technology that, while entering a dialogue with the works of the Frankfurt school, especially those of Habermas, seeks to overcome their inherent contradictions. According to Freitag, the development of capitalist globalization alters the very substance of society as it tends to morph itself into a self-regulating cybernetic system. His sociology allows us to apprehend phenomena tied to the development of contemporary digital technologies such as the drive towards a new form of algorithmic governmentality fueled by digital oligopolies that increasingly dominate globalized capitalism, the rise of fake news in the era of post-truth and the transformation of subjectivity. Finally, his critique enables potent reflection on the dialectical possibilities of overcoming the dynamics of contemporary alienation. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Critical theory has already marked that technology often threatens civil liberties, personal autonomy, and rights. Heidegger, later Marcuse, emphasized how technology is not value-free in its own revealing power of the surrounding environment, external and inner nature. Throughout this paper, I explore how the aesthetic approach engages with critical theory and contributes to the sociology of media and communication. For this, I will theoretically survey the terms of sociality under the forces of immediate communication, ubiquitous surveillance, and the compression of time and space that Baudrillard and Virilio once problematized through the lens of critical technology theory to adapt it to media and communication studies. I contend that techno-aesthetics that converge with Rancière’s dissensus can provide practical suggestions on an updated vocation of critical sociology. This article discusses the potential of aesthetic and social criticism of media for democratizing technology that Feenberg inserted. It is urgent to acknowledge the changing spatio-temporal aesthetic regimes that affect the societal imagination and limits of sociality and action to determine the next steps for achieving a commons-based society. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Although the transformation of welfare states carries far-reaching implications for property relations, there is an astonishing amnesia regarding property in research concerning the welfare state. To date, the French sociologist Robert Castel is the only thinker to have illuminated the connection between property and social rights: he understands transfer payments and public infrastructures as social property and describes them as rehabilitation of the previously propertyless. Starting out from Castel’s concept of social property, the article discusses its strengths and weaknesses and elaborates conceptually on what it would mean to think of social rights consistently as social property. The authors argue that it is a worthwhile endeavour to think further with and go beyond Castel’s concept of social property. This allows not only to think about public alternatives to private property and to theorise the dismantling of social rights as expropriation, but also to think further on the democratisation of social rights. </jats:p>

<jats:p> How and why does colonial domination kill off the very labor it depends on? While settler colonial studies provide one of the only theorizations of the systemic elimination of populations, they see it as antithetical to labor exploitation, and thus cannot answer this question. I therefore build on recent critiques of settler colonial studies to develop the concept of racialized extractive labor regimes: race marking labor as disposable, as realizing value through expending workers’ lives. I then articulate these dynamics through a comparison of the highly divergent cases of early colonialism in Peru and what is now the United States, first across initial settlement and then as they shifted to racialization decades later. While settler colonial studies emphasize land acquisition as colonialism’s defining feature, my comparison reveals that elites’ drive for indelible inequality actually shapes colonial projects. And in order to maintain their vaunted positions, elites ultimately construct racialized extractive labor regimes that predicate their domination on the regularized elimination of racialized Others. This analysis therein provides new insights into the elitist nature of colonialism and the logics of elimination and racialization through which it runs. </jats:p>