Full Description
This book revisits social theory with a view to highlighting certain essential features of 'good' social theory: its ability to raise certain questions, its explanatory power, its critical and reflexive interrogation of concepts, its search for objectivity, its concern to make sense of empirical data and its aim of projecting some degree of generality and abstraction. With particular attention to issues of nationalism, democracy, civil society, state, feminism, neoliberalism, minority rights, environment and North-East Indian society, it considers whether new and more relevant theoretical questions need to be asked.
It will therefore appeal to scholars of social theory and political sociology with interests in new approaches to social theory and the development of local or 'indigenous' social thought.
Contents
Introduction Part I: New Currents in Social Theory 1. What is social theory? 2. Social theory today: Revisiting hope 3. Empathy between sociology and social neuroscience: New perspectives for an applied sociology 4. Applying Graeber's extension of Mauss' The Gift to the study of international relations 5. Towards a socio-phenomenological approach to empathy 6. Contemporary contributions to critiques of political economy and alternative planetary futures: Political economy, moral economy, moral sociology, spiritual ecology and beyond Part II: Social Theory and the Context of Neo-liberalism 7. New media, popular culture and social theory 8. Social and political theory in the times of neo-liberalism 9. Revisiting Gellnerian theory of nation and Nationalism 10. Neoliberal environmentalism and social theory: Constructing myth over reality 11. Identity, values and consumption practices 12. Legitimizing menstrual leave at workplace: Documenting the sociological theories explanations Part III: Issues and Challenges for Social Theory from India 13. Theorising Contemporary Vernacular politics in Northeast India and its Sociology 14. Eco-feminism in the context of tribal society 15. Theorizing better: A debate of theory and practice in the context of an Indigenous setting
