Culture, ideology and consent: on contemporary myths

Culture, ideology and consent: on contemporary myths*   by Vasiliki Papageorgiou Ethnologist-Social Anthropologist, PhD     In this article I start by discussing Rolan Barthes’ contribution in the development of cultural studies, particularly focusing on his early and pioneering work “Mythologies”. Barthes elaborates an analysis of the mythical system and its function in cultural communication, … Read more

The Imperative to Love Death and Hate Eternity

Humanism apparently died somewhere round the mid-nineteen sixties. Now the human is to be resurrected by technocrats and technologists—so-called “transhumanists.” This time not as flesh, as the Christian resurrected body, but through a machine that brooks no mortal coil. This machine will be the flesh of the digital believer. Through technological wizardry the “soft machine” … Read more

Regarding Postcolonial Sociology

Marx, Weber and Durkheim are often accredited with being a kind of triadic foundation to classical sociological theory. All three of them dealt with issues pertaining to the historical development of capitalism and the rise of modernity. In this way, sociology was from its inception a discipline oriented toward theorizing modernity and diagnosing its ills. … Read more

Bureaucratically Distorted Communication: The Case of Managed Mental Health Care

My recent article from Social Theory & Health 14(4), September 2016. Abstract Mental health treatment providers today are subject to insurance company regulation. Using grounded theory to analyze 33 interviews of treatment providers, I portray this regulation as a form of surveillance that operates through discourse, and ask how treatment providers communicate with and through this system. … Read more

The postmodern left and the success of neoliberalism

Article originally posted on libcom by Scott Jay, on Jan 05. 2016. Editorial note: One more important article, from the beginning of this year, after all illusions of “left government” in Greece were dissolved, in context of the austerity measures, reformism, memorandum, referendum, economy,liberties and involvement of intellectuals of the left in real-politics and its … Read more