Crisis in the Tar Sands: Fossil Capitalism and the Future of the Alberta Hydrocarbon Economy

Using a case study of Alberta, Canada, this paper demonstrates how a geographic critique of fossil capitalism helps elucidate the tensions shaping tar sands development. Conflicts over pipelines and Indigenous territorial claims are challenging development trajectories, as tar sands companies need to expand access to markets in order to expand production. While these conflicts are now well recognised, there are also broader dynamics shaping development. States face a rentier’s dilemma, relying on capital investments to realise resource value. Political responses to the emerging climate crisis undercut the profitability of hydrocarbon extraction. The automation of production undermines the industrial compromise between hydrocarbon labour and capital. Ultimately, the crises of fossil capitalism require a radical transformation within or beyond capital relations. To mobilise against the tar sands, organisers must recognise the tensions underpinning it, developing strategies that address ecological concerns and the economic plight of those dispossessed and abandoned by carbon extraction.

The Cautious Politics of “Humanizing” Refugee Research

In this intervention, I reflect on what it may mean to ‘humanize’ refugee research. The assumption often made is that ‘humanizing’ can arise through a concern with the particularity of the individual, through drawing from ‘the mass’ the narrative of the singular and employing this as a means to identify, , and potentially understand others. Yet such a move risks a reliance on creating relations of empathy and compassion that elide political responses to dehumanization and often relies on a assumption of what constitutes the category of “the human,” an assumption that has been critically challenged by post-colonial writing.

Racial Order, Racialized Responses: Interminority Politics in a Diverse Nation

America's racial sands are quickly shifting, with parallel growth in theories to explain how varied groups respond, politically, to demographic changes. This Element develops a unified framework to predict when, why, and how racial groups react defensively toward others. America's racial groups can be arrayed along two dimensions: how American and how superior are they considered? This Element claims that location along these axes motivates political reactions to outgroups. Using original survey data and experiments, this Element reveals the acute sensitivity that people of color have to their social station and how it animates political responses to racial diversity.

Pitirim Sorokin and COVID-19

In 1942, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a survivor of the post-WorldWar I pandemic, published "Man and Society in Calamity," a comparative study of the human response (including political responses) to four recurrent mass-death events. One was "pestilence." Sorokin reached many general conclusions. In Fall of 2020, the author of this paper (Wilkinson) held a seminar whose students attempted to re-evaluate Sorokin's conclusions, based upon their own experiences, observations, and mutual dialogue. In general, the seminar found that Sorokin's conclusions were mostly still applicable, but that his social theory of pestilence needed drastic changes as concerned (a) the gendered, class-based, ethnic and national distribution of pestilence and its consequences of pestilence, (b) the much-changed capacity (from 1942) for the scientific and technological response to pestilence, and (c) the much changed capacity (again, since 1942) for international-organizational response to pestilence. With these updates, Sorokin's theory of the human social response to pestilence can serve as guidance both for study and for policy in regard not only to the current pandemic, but for epidemics and pandemics yet to come.

Communicating the unknown

This paper presents an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper articles on the coronavirus pandemic. We develop a tagset in an interdisciplinary team from corpus linguistics and sociology. After working out a gold standard on a pilot corpus, we apply the annotation to the entire corpus drawing on an “annotation-by-query” approach in CQPWeb, based on uncertainty constructions that have been extracted from the gold standard data. The annotated data are then evaluated and sociologically contextualised. On this basis, we study the development of uncertainty markers in the period under study and compare media discourses in Germany and the UK. Our findings reflect the different courses of the pandemic in Germany and the UK as well as the different political responses, media traditions and cultural concerns: While markers of fear are more important in British discourse, we see a steadily increasing level of disagreement in German discourse. Other forms of uncertainty such as ‘possibility’ or ‘probability’ are similarly frequent in both discourses.

The English Government Hits Limits: Knowledge Politics and Covid-19

Tragic its consequences, the Covid-19 pandemic has ripped through societies with, at the time of writing, global death rates exceeding two and a half million people. In the process, there has been variability in terms of how effectively governments have dealt with the pandemic. Differences between political responses, forms of governance and the relationships between science and politics are apparent. This article investigates these relations in the United Kingdom with a particular focus upon the interpretations that informed the response of the English Government and their interactions with the scientific community. For this purpose, it provides an exploration of the political and socio-economic conditions prevailing in the United Kingdom prior to the pandemic. It then examines the interactions between science and politics as the pandemic unfolded during 2020. Then, building on these discussions it views the tensions that arose through a clash between two characteristics within democratic societies: the redemptive and pragmatic. What becomes apparent is the tendency for a form of the redemptive to be favoured over the pragmatic which results in an exposure of limits to usual and narrow political ways of governing.

The Bounds of Their Habitation

Chapter 2 explicates the theology behind southern evangelicals’ resistance to civil rights. It explains why conservative white Christians opposed civil rights reforms, arguing that a significant percentage of these Christians constructed a theology from both the natural world and biblical texts in which God was viewed as the author of segregation, and one who desired that racial separatism be maintained. Referencing letters, sermons, pamphlets, and books, this chapter documents how segregationist theology was crafted, defended, and deployed throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the South. It also demonstrates how such a theology supported a segregationist Christianity that became common in southern white churches, proving influential in shaping the social and political responses white southerners had to the civil rights movement.