Beck's theory of risk society offers a powerful account of manufactured uncertainty, transboundary hazards, and the limits of national and class-based insulation under reflexive modernization. Yet its universalizing language remains insufficient for explaining how risks are differentially produced, displaced, governed, and lived across colonial and postcolonial geographies. This article critically reconstructs Beck from the standpoint of the Global South, understood not as a fixed geography but as a historically produced positionality within unequal global power relations. I argue that the key issue is not whether risks become transboundary but how unequal capacities for protection, buffering, accountability, and repair stabilize asymmetrical exposure under global interdependence. To address this, I propose the concept of unequal risk regimes, through which accumulation logics, spatial displacement, slow violence, and institutional-epistemic mechanisms combine to routinize and obscure harm. Beck's theory should not be abandoned; rather, it should be transformed through a justice- and mechanism-oriented sociology of global risk.
Conventional third places have declined among marginalized communities, yet what takes their place in fostering solidarity has been undertheorized. This article introduces the concept of “emotional third places” to explain how marginalized groups temporarily transform ordinary environments through collective emotional practices. Unlike frameworks emphasizing formal organization or planned resistance, emotional third places emerge through spontaneous gatherings and recurring rituals in spaces never intended for community-building. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, I identify four key mechanisms: formation through collective recognition, boundary maintenance through performative solidarity, dissolution through external pressure, and spatial transformation through collective behavior. By theorizing how collective emotions can reorganize spatial power relations through affective rather than political processes, this framework illuminates community formation across varying physical spaces. As traditional communal spaces become inaccessible to marginalized populations, understanding how these groups foster temporary but significant connections through shared emotional experiences is vital for comprehending social life.
In the context of ongoing debates in the social sciences on the relationship between race, gender, and the reproduction of capitalist society, many scholars have turned to the concept of “articulation.” However, it remains unclear how, exactly, capital and ascriptive difference are articulated and why particular articulations of race, gender, and capital remain so enduring. This article undertakes a critical reading of Stuart Hall’s landmark writing on articulation to engage these themes. I begin by contextualizing Hall’s “articulationist” approach, situating it in relation to Louis Althusser’s writing on articulation and in relation to the “modes of production debate.” Against the backdrop of Hall’s account, I then argue that the built environment is a mechanism through which the articulation of capital and difference occurs and a critical “line of tendential force” that holds articulations together over time and space.
Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus explains class reproduction but undertheorizes social mobility. I address this by developing the conditions model of the habitus, which preserves the concept’s core features while challenging Bourdieu’s assumption that people in the same class share the same conditions and habitus. Using interviews from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I demonstrate that youth in the same class develop different habitus in different conditions. At the bottom of the class structure, youth raised in constraining conditions typically form a habitus oriented toward class reproduction, whereas those in less constraining conditions often form a habitus oriented toward upward mobility. At the top, youth raised in conditions free from constraint tend to develop a habitus geared toward class reproduction, and those in more constrained conditions develop a habitus oriented toward downward mobility. Thus, separating class from conditions illuminates how the habitus contributes to both reproduction and mobility.
In his sociology of the state, Bourdieu introduces the concept of "de-particularization" to spotlight processes through which those who dominate the state establish their particular lifestyle as a universal cultural norm. While Bourdieu did not elaborate on such processes, the article develops a specific mechanism of de-particularization in articulating his framework with postcolonial perspectives on analogies between race and class. Focusing on the German Empire and drawing on published and unpublished sources, it shows how the Verein f & uuml;r Sozialpolitik, a prominent social policy actor in the emerging welfare state, implicitly analogized the worker question and questions of racial degeneration in a study on European tropical settlement. As the principles of vision and division distinguishing workers from the educated bourgeoisie were transposed onto the difference of colonizers and natives, the ethos regarded as particularly bourgeois in previous investigations of the worker question came to be construed as universally German.
