Social-Theory on emsenn.net

Social-Theory on emsenn.net https://emsenn.net/tags/social-theory/ Recent content in Social-Theory on emsenn.net Hugo en Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Mediation https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/philosophy/domains/western/domains/marxism/terms/mediation/ Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/philosophy/domains/western/domains/marxism/terms/mediation/ <p>Mediation is the principle that determinations do not stand alone or move in isolation. They are connected through intermediate relations, processes, and forms.</p> <p>In dialectics, mediation opposes immediacy. An immediate account says A produces B directly. A mediated account asks which structures, temporal phases, and relation chains connect A to B.</p> <p>In social analysis, mediation helps distinguish structural explanation from narrative sequence. Saying “crisis produced reform” is incomplete unless the institutions, conflicts, and mechanisms that carried the transition are specified.</p> Reification https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/philosophy/domains/western/domains/marxism/terms/reification/ Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/philosophy/domains/western/domains/marxism/terms/reification/ <p>Reification is the transformation of historically produced social relations into apparently natural or thing-like facts.</p> <p>In Marxist and Lukácsian analysis, reification obscures mediation: what is socially produced appears as if it were simply given, autonomous, and beyond alteration [@lukacs-sep-2023].</p> <p>The critical task is de-reification: recovering the processes, relations, and institutions that produce the appearance of objectivity.</p> <h2 id="related-terms"><a href="#related-terms" class="heading-anchor" aria-label="Link to this section">¶</a>Related terms </h2> <ul> <li><a href="./totality.md" class="link-internal">Totality</a></li> <li><a href="./dialectics.md" class="link-internal">Dialectics</a></li> <li><a href="./historicization.md" class="link-internal">Historicization</a></li> </ul> Totality https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/philosophy/domains/western/domains/marxism/terms/totality/ Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/philosophy/domains/western/domains/marxism/terms/totality/ <p>Totality is the methodological demand to analyze parts through the structured whole that conditions their meaning and function.</p> <p>In dialectical usage, totality does not mean a closed or final system. It means that phenomena are relationally constituted: labor, law, state, and culture are not self-explanatory in isolation.</p> <p>In Lukácsian terms, totality is central to overcoming fragmented or reified appearances in social analysis [@lukacs-sep-2023].</p> <h2 id="related-terms"><a href="#related-terms" class="heading-anchor" aria-label="Link to this section">¶</a>Related terms </h2> <ul> <li><a href="./dialectics.md" class="link-internal">Dialectics</a></li> <li><a href="./mediation.md" class="link-internal">Mediation</a></li> <li><a href="./historicization.md" class="link-internal">Historicization</a></li> </ul> AIDS Crisis https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/aids-crisis/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/aids-crisis/ <p>The <strong>AIDS crisis</strong> names not only a biomedical epidemic but a political event: the systematic abandonment of queer, racialized, and poor populations by the state during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s onward. In the United States, the Reagan administration refused to publicly acknowledge AIDS until 1985, years after the epidemic was killing thousands. Federal research funding was delayed, public health infrastructure was withheld, and the populations most affected — gay and bisexual men, trans women, IV drug users, Haitian immigrants, hemophiliacs, sex workers — were treated as disposable.</p> institution https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/terms/institution/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/terms/institution/ <p>An institution is a stable, organized pattern of <a href="./practice.md" class="link-internal">practices</a> that structures how people act in a domain. Hospitals, schools, courts, prisons, the military, churches, and markets are institutions. So are less visible things: marriage, medical diagnosis, academic peer review, the job interview.</p> <p>What makes something an institution rather than just a habit or a preference is that it persists beyond the individuals who participate in it. A teacher retires; the school continues. Institutions carry rules, roles, procedures, and expectations that exist before any particular person fills them and continue after that person leaves.</p> Intersectionality https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/intersectionality/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/intersectionality/ <p><strong>Intersectionality</strong> is a term coined by <a href="../../../../general/domains/people/kimberle-crenshaw.md" class="link-internal">Kimberlé Crenshaw</a> in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and elaborated in “Mapping the Margins” (1991). Crenshaw developed the concept to name a specific failure: anti-discrimination law could address race discrimination or sex discrimination but could not recognize the particular harm experienced by Black women, for whom race and gender are not separable axes of oppression but co-constituting structures. A Black woman fired from a workplace that employs Black men and white women experiences a harm that neither racial discrimination nor sex discrimination, analyzed separately, can capture.</p> Normalization https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/normalization/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/normalization/ <p><strong>Normalization</strong> names the process by which certain practices, identities, and ways of being are constituted as “normal” — and thereby rendered invisible, unmarked, and presumptively natural. <a href="../../../../general/domains/people/michel-foucault.md" class="link-internal">Michel Foucault</a> identified normalization as the characteristic operation of disciplinary power in <em>Discipline and Punish</em> (1975): modern institutions govern not primarily by prohibiting deviant acts but by producing a standard of normality against which all conduct is measured, ranked, and corrected. The examination, the case file, the statistical distribution — these are the instruments through which normal and abnormal are produced.</p> Stigma https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/stigma/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/queer/terms/stigma/ <p><strong>Stigma</strong> is a concept systematized by <a href="../../../../general/domains/people/erving-goffman.md" class="link-internal">Erving Goffman</a> in <em>Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity</em> (1963). Goffman defined stigma as a relationship between an attribute and a stereotype: a deeply discrediting gap between a person’s “virtual social identity” (what others expect them to be) and their “actual social identity” (what they are or are perceived to be). Stigma is not a property of a person or an attribute but a relationship between persons produced in social interaction.</p> Subject https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/foucauldian/terms/subject/ Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://emsenn.net/library/domains/humanities/domains/sociology/domains/critical-theory/domains/foucauldian/terms/subject/ <p>A subject is a person as produced by the institutions, practices, and discourses that act on them. The word carries a deliberate double meaning: a subject is both the one who acts (the thinking subject of philosophy) and the one who is acted upon (the subject of a king, the subject of an experiment). Foucault used the term to name this double bind: people are constituted as agents through the same processes that constitute them as objects of power. In “The Subject and Power” (1982), he described his work’s central concern as “not power, but the subject” — understanding how human beings are made into subjects through specific historical practices.</p>