WestEnd

Based on a qualitative study, this article discusses the psychotherapeutic practice of interpreting and “translating” patients’ suffering, presenting it as a practice of “biographization.” The associated psychotherapeutic concept of the...

This article reconstructs the sociocultural genesis of the “meat paradox. ” By this is meant the historical transformations that turned meat consumption into an affectively ambivalent practice that requires justification and thus is no longer...

The following contribution attempts, in the form of a brief rejoinder to objections raised by William Scheuerman, to at least hint at solutions for three intricate and intertwined problems of a critical theory of society: in a first step, it will...

Critical Theory is committed to tying theory to practice and thus to anchoring theory in pre-theoretical experience, oppositional forms of consciousness and theorization, as well as practices of critique and resistance – while at the same time...

Smart orders are characterized by their use of technologies which ensure that a norm will be obeyed in a concrete case. Their aim is to avoid mistakes. The technology is based on collecting and analyzing behavioral data through which future behavior...

Despite a broad pluralism of methodological approaches, the different methods of qualitative social research are based on the assumption that social reality must be explored from the perspectives of social actors. The issue on "Actors of Critique"...

Axel Honneth belongs among a group of Frankfurt critical theorists now worried that its wide-ranging critical theory of society has being jettisoned in favor of a narrow liberal political-theoretical concern with “legalism.” Though Honneth...

This article discusses the significance of the actor’s perspective in the context of empirical social research from the point of view of gender studies. It sheds light on the question of partiality, on the one hand, and the structure of the...

The paper argues for rethinking the social ontology of critical social research from the perspective of interdependence theory. On the one hand, this perspective decenters the categorical divisions between researcher/research subjects,...

Whereas postcolonial-feminist anthropologists have been interrogating the colonial paradigms, methodologies and methods of fieldwork and ethnography in general for decades and have engaged with questions of methodological decolonization, related...

With her book The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Katharina Pistor presents, in the reviewer’s view, nothing less than a “crisis theory of law.” Adam Tooze is impressed by Pistor’s analysis, which reveals how law,...

To the present day, the social understanding of architecture is shaped by narratives in which the integrity of architects and their work is asserted. This article argues that the ideological function of this model of interpretation becomes apparent...

The article argues that research into the sexual abuse of children calls for a comprehensive and multidimensional understanding of violence. This argument is based specifically on current theoretical considerations about childhood. The guiding...

Family life is still characterized by high levels of violence, even though violent behavior is now extensively socially ostracized and legally sanctioned. Against the backdrop of the existing literature, which tends to be exclusively descriptive and...

Starting from a case study (on a fatal stabbing in Chemnitz, Germany in August 2018, and the violent riots that followed), the article reflects on the relationship between democracy and judgment in the digital era: the rapid transformation of rumors...

The »philologist king« designates a neglected figure of early nationalism. Jacob Grimm argued that philological knowledge was vital to legitimate rule, since only the study of the history of language and of grammar could uncover the form of the...

Current research on violence runs the risk of developing a visibility bias, i.e. of devoting disproportionate attention to phenomena of violence that are publicly accessible and audiovisually recorded. Such research exacerbates the fundamental...

Domestic violence is always part of the history of a relationship involving different parties. In such a context, violence develops forms of obstinacy that facilitate and restrict the actions and interpretations of the participants in certain ways....

Recent German research on violence has become increasingly unsure of its explanatory claims. This essay addresses the argument that explanations of violence tend to serve as reassurances of society’s conception of itself as averse to violence and...

Contemporary representations of fifteenth-century political thought still rely centrally on Quentin Skinner’s neo-republican paradigm. In recent years, however, historians have increasingly criticized the Cambridge School for forcing Medieval and...

Édouard Louis writes about his alienation from the proletarian milieu of his birth, about gay desire and homophobia and his hatred of French politics. For the reviewer, however, his autobiographical novels History of Violence and Who Killed My...