Prelims

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Planetary Sociology

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Current Perspectives in Social Theory

Series Editor: Harry F. Dahms

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Current Perspectives in Social Theory Volume 40

Planetary Sociology: Beyond the Entanglement of Identity and Social Structure

Edited by

Harry F. Dahms

University of Tennessee – Knoxville, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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First edition 2023

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ISBN: 978-1-80043-508-7 (Online)

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ISSN: 0278-1204 (Series)

About the Contributors

Lucas Fucci Amato is Assistant Professor at the Department of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law at the University of São Paulo Law School. He received a Habilitation (2021) and PhD (2017) in Law from the University of São Paulo. He was Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School (2016) and Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (2019–2020). Amato is Coeditor of the volume on Luhmann and Socio-Legal Research: An Empirical Agenda for Social Systems Theory (Routledge, 2021).

Thomas F. Bechtold holds a master's from The New School for Social Research (New York) in Sociology, and is a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, specializing in political ecology and environmental sociology through critical social theories of planetarity. He has previously published in Fast Capitalism.

Joel M. Crombez (PhD, University of Tennesse – Knoxville) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Kennesaw State University. Working within the tradition of critical theory, his research lies at the intersection of political economy, technology, and mental health/psychoanalysis. His book, Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method: Toward a Theory and Practice of Critical Socioanalysis (Brill, 2021), is now available in paperback through Haymarket Press. Most recently he contributed a piece titled “Shaped by the AI: Planning for a Future With or Without Us?” to a policy-oriented report, HumaniTies and Artificial Intelligence (edited by Freddy Paul Grunert), commissioned and published by the European Union. Like many critical theorists who study modern societies, the erupting contradictions of modern society keep him from having many other interests these days.

Harry F. Dahms (PhD, New School for Social Research, 1993) is Professor of Sociology, Codirector of the Center for the Study of Social Justice, and Cochair of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory and director of the International Social Theory Consortium. He is the author of The Vitality of Critical Theory (2011), has edited and coedited a dozen other books, and has published in Sociological Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Comparative Sociology, Critical Sociology, Basic Income Studies, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, and other journals, along with chapters in collections, encyclopedias and handbooks edited by others. Currently, he is finishing a book manuscript, Modern Society as Artifice: Critical Theory and the Logic of Capital. He also is working on a monograph on planetary sociology and another on sociology, critical theory, and science fiction.

Joseph C. Hermanowicz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Georgia. His work concentrates on the sociology of higher education and related topics tied to the sociology of science, organizational culture, and life course studies. He is the author of Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and The Stars Are Not Enough: Scientists – Their Passions and Professions (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and editor of Challenges to Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) and The American Academic Profession: Transformation in Contemporary Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). A component of his most recent work examines organizational dysfunction and deviance in the academic profession and higher education institutions.

Asafa Jalata is Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Africana Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His teaching and research expertise focuses on Oromo studies, global studies, development and international inequality, social movements, nationalism, terrorism studies, indigenous studies, human rights, democracy, and race and ethnicity. Professor Jalata's most recent books include The Oromo Movement and Imperial Politics: Ideology and Culture in Oromia and Ethiopia (New York: Lexington Books, 2021/2022), Cultural Capital and Prospects for Democracy in Botswana and Ethiopia (London: Routledge, 2019/2020), Phases of Terrorism in the Age of Globalization: From Christopher Columbus to Osama bin Laden (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016/2017), and Contending Nationalisms of Oromia and Ethiopia: Struggling for Statehood, Sovereignty and Multinational Democracy (Global Academic Publishing of Binghamton University, 2010). Professor Jalata has published and edited 14 books and authored more than 100 refereed articles, book chapters, and other articles.

Reha Kadakal is Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University Channel Islands. He received his PhD in Sociology from The New School for Social Research. His recent publications include “Lukács and the Problem of Knowledge: Critical Ontology as Social Theory” in Georg Lukács and the Possibility of Critical Social Ontology, edited by Michael J. Thompson (Brill, 2020) and “History, Critique, and Progress: Amy Allen's ‘End of Progress’ and the Normative Grounding of Critical Theory” (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 36, 2019). Building on the original project of critical social theory, his work investigates the normative foundations of social theory.

Anthony J. Knowles is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests include automation and transformations of labor, critical theory, basic income, queer theory, and political theory and democracy. He was a guest researcher at the University of Bielefeld for his dissertation research, which involves a comparative historical and theoretical analysis of automation and technological displacement in the United States and Germany.

Emily M. Landry is Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington and Lee University in the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics in Lexington, Virginia. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Tennessee, an MA in Political Science from the Central European University, and a BA in International Studies from Trinity University. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and convene around comparative entrepreneurship with a focus on social enterprises and B Corps. Her fieldwork has taken her across the United States, and she continues longitudinal studies in Cuba. She has taught classes in departments of business and sociology including business ethics, entrepreneurship, environmental sociology, the modern world system, and research methods. She is a founding board member of B Academics – a nonprofit devoted to research, teaching, and engagement with the B Corp community.

Laurindo Dias Minhoto is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of São Paulo. He holds an LLM in Law in Development from Warwick University (1993) and a PhD in Philosophy and General Theory of Law from the University of São Paulo (1997). Minhoto was visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society of the University of California, School of Law, Berkeley, USA (2015). His research is in the areas of sociology of law and punishment and critical and systems theory. He is a member of the research group Carceral Studies Working Group (CSLS, UC Berkeley).

Bethany Nelson is a Lecturer at the University of Tennessee where she earned her PhD in 2022. Her primary research interests lie at the intersections of criminology, culture, horror, and subject making. Her other interests include social theory, death and dying, Appalachia, and neoliberal social formations.

Stelios Alfonso Panageotou is Assistant Professor of Political Economy at The College of Idaho. His research explores the tension between the capitalist economy and democratic political system. This interest led to his study of the antidemocratic management of Greece's financial crisis, which has appeared in Review of Radical Political Economics and Comparative Sociology. He has since shifted his focus to the United States where he decenters the human from democratic processes and focuses instead on corporations and money in politics. Elements of this project have appeared in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, The SAGE Handbook of Political Sociology, and Fast Capitalism.

Rachel A. Ponder is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and the Criminal Justice Program Coordinator at Maryville College. She received a Master of Criminal Justice from Boston University and began a short career in law enforcement before attending the University of Tennessee where she received her PhD and Disasters, Displacement, and Human Rights graduate certificate. She has taught several undergraduate courses including Social Problems & Social Justice, Introduction to Sociology, Criminal Justice, Criminology, Investigative Forensics, and Criminal Law & Procedure. Her research interests include transitional justice, political/state violence and harm, justice studies, and law and policy. These themes can be seen in her dissertation, Justice Involvement During COVID-19 and the Possibility of Transitional Justice (2022), which focuses on the pandemic as a catalyst to offer a transitional justice attempt to address mass incarceration, human rights, and harmful policies related to the American criminal justice system.

Vivian Swayne was born and raised in Appalachia and is currently a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include law, policing, and state violence, with a focus on sexuality and social justice. She has experience in counseling, community organizing, and the nonprofit sector.

Della Winters is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Stanislaus. Dr. Winters's research examines the consequences of the expanding carceral state and mass surveillance, particularly within the lives of women. Using qualitative data collection methods, she explores the intersections of privilege and disadvantage within carceral mechanisms. Dr. Winters' most recent research traces the emergence of long-acting reversible contraceptives as the primary mechanisms of reproductive healthcare and social policy in Tennessee.

Preface

In addition to an introductory section dedicated to an overview of the chapters included in this volume and a short chapter delineating the need for the paradigm of planetary sociology, the bulk of the chapters in this volume comprises contributions by both junior faculty and advanced graduate students that highlight and illustrate the importance and utility of planetary sociology as a novel reference frame. Its purpose is to deploy social theory for the purpose of illuminating our situatedness within social structures as concrete, specific, and distinctive features of social contexts that shape, support, and burden our identities. In this sense, this volume pointedly provides examples of “applied theory,” while relying explicitly on different traditions and instances drawn from the expanding canon of social theory. In addition, this volume includes contributions by senior scholars that are located at the intersection of identity structure and social structure, but which do rely on or address the paradigm of planetary sociology. They do, however, provide strong arguments and analyses that emphasize the centrality of related issues to the study of social life and modern societies in the twenty-first century.

Work on this volume dates back several years. I organized a one-day workshop on planetary sociology at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, hosted by Rhiannon Leebrick, in March 2017, and two sessions on the topic at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in Atlanta, Georgia, in April 2019. On both occasions, contributors to this volume presented early drafts of their papers.

In addition, I presented papers delineating the paradigm at the Annual Conference of the International Social Theory Consortium in Innsbruck in May 2017, at the Self & Society Annual Conference (online) in August 2020, the Annual Conference of the Mid-South Sociological Association in Charlotte, North Carolina, in October 2021, and in the Sociology Graduate Colloquium of the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville in March 2022.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank my home institution for supporting a leave semester in spring 2019, enabling me to circumscribe the paradigm presented here more precisely, and to move ahead with this volume. Furthermore, I taught six summer PhD-level graduate seminars under the aegis of planetary sociology between 2016 and 2022 in which several contributors to this volume participated, on such topics as “Planetary Sociology: Identity and Social Structure in Modernity” (2016); “Globalization: Capital, Identity” (2017); “American Exceptionalism as a Sociological Category” (2018); “Prejudice, Ideology, Modernity” (2020); “Sociology of American Democracy” (2021); and “Planetarity” (2022).

Finally, an early essay that addressed the theme of this volume appeared in 2018, with the title “Critical Theory, Radical Reform and Planetary Sociology: Between Impossibility and Inevitability” (Dahms, 2018).

I am pleased to thank Katy Mathers, Lydia Cutmore, Abinaya Chinnasamy, and Shanmathi Priya Sampath for the consistently superb work for and support of Current Perspectives in Social Theory.