Sociology Lens最新文献

Posthumanism is a contemporary intellectual movement that redefines the relationship between humans, technology, biology, and culture. While questioning the traditional humanist perspective that places humans at the center of the universe, it also examines the transformative effects of technology on human identity. This study explores the esthetic and ethical dimensions of posthumanist thought through the new perspectives on human identity offered by cybernetic art. Contemporary artistic practices aligned with posthumanist thinking produce experimental works that reshape the human body through biotechnology and artificial intelligence, questioning identity, the body, and subjectivity. The works created by contemporary artists using artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and cybernetic systems raise new epistemological and ontological questions about how art may evolve in the posthuman era. The application of cybernetic systems to art has led to new esthetic paradigms. This article analyzes human–machine interactions and their effects on esthetic transformations in art. The study demonstrates that cybernetic art functions as a critical field in which human, technological, and nonhuman relations are actively reconfigured through technological mediation, redistributed agency, and relational subjectivity.

This article traces the transformation of global development from a discourse of aspirational equality to a regime of posthumanitarian militarism. It shows how aid, once framed as solidarity and progress, increasingly operates as an instrument of coercion, surveillance, and containment. Drawing on historical sociology and decolonial critique, the article argues that postwar development legitimated global stratification by promising political recognition while deferring redistribution. As this legitimating order unravels, illustrated by U.S. foreign aid retrenchment and the European Union's migration-security nexus, a new mode of governance has emerged: one that manages inequality through exclusion rather than inclusion. The analysis contributes to sociology by reframing development as a mechanism of stratification, by showing how racialized hierarchies structure global governance, and by advancing postimperial solidarity as a normative alternative grounded in redistribution, epistemic plurality, and collective responsibility.

The ANT-Mobilities framework synthesizes Actor-Network Theory, the mobilities paradigm, and historical sociology to analyze complex social transformations. This paper develops the framework through empirical engagement with post-disaster rehabilitation networks following the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, demonstrating how crisis contexts generate theoretical insights unavailable to either ANT or mobilities research alone. Drawing on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork, forty semi-structured interviews with survivors and caregivers, and policy document analysis, the study reveals how recovery networks emerged through complex interactions of caregivers, technologies, policy and spiritual actors. The latter are traced not as cultural beliefs but as actants producing observable network effects, following Latour's modes of existence framework. From this empirical encounter, transectionality emerges as a concept capturing the partial, contested, and multi-directional nature of translation processes where network stabilization remains perpetually incomplete. This novel historical sociology advances a post-humanist critique of anthropocentric materialism while engaging eco-Marxist scholarship, maintaining rigorous attention to how capitalist extraction, colonial legacies, and neoliberal governance shape network formations across temporal scales. Applied comparatively to COVID-19 pandemic response, the framework demonstrates portability across crisis contexts. This contribution challenges sociology's persistent materialism while demonstrating that spiritual actors can be traced with methodological rigor through their network effects and mediating roles.

In the twentieth century, academic concerns about changes in the racial demographics of the United States emanated from the potential crisis of settler colonial decline. In their references to previous empires, stories of contact between people groups, and changes in demographics, settler scholars worked to provide solutions to the ever-present threat of racial difference. Two variants of eugenic responses aimed to predict the relationship between people(s) and the empire-state. Early US sociology was central to these efforts. Scholars trained at the University of Chicago combined eugenic ideas with settler colonial ideologies of Indigenous erasure and elimination. They worked for the empire-state as social scientists tasked with predicting the stability of the empire through notions of race. They argued for laws and programs that either criminalized interracial unions or promoted racial amalgamation. Seemingly contradictory strategies shared an ideology that the greatest crisis was the instability of the empire-state. The impetus for eugenic projects, that states that not only rule over populations but can and should work to produce a certain kind of population amenable and useful to state rule, is still with us today.