Settler-colonial theory has become an influential framework in sociology. Yet its central claim—that settler-colonialism is an enduring structure organized by a “logic of elimination”—generates a theoretical paradox. If settler-colonialism is total, how can Indigenous agency be theorized without reproducing the structure it seeks to transcend? I address this tension by bringing sociological theories of structure and agency into dialogue with settler-colonial studies and Indigenous theory. Drawing on William Sewell Jr.’s conception of structure as the coupling of cultural schemas and material resources, I reinterpret two foundational concepts: the logic of elimination and the politics of recognition. Yet Indigenous theorists highlight forms of agency that exceed sociological accounts of action within a shared structural field. I therefore distinguish between interior agency, exercised within settler structures, and exterior agency, which sustains Indigenous worlds beyond them.
Across the world’s most powerful states, millions actively embrace the destruction of the shared reality on which democratic life depends. Democracy does not simply collapse from without; it can be unmade from within through consent. This article introduces hegemonic fragmentation, an original concept revealing how declining empires manufacture consent for their own unraveling. Synthesizing Arendt’s analysis of the common world with Hall’s theory of hegemonic consent, I generate a novel framework to identify the culturally constructed consent for the dissolution of shared factuality, political space, and meaning, experienced not as loss but as freedom and belonging. Imperial melancholia, the refusal to mourn lost dominance, is the affective mechanism converting structural decline into the desire to destroy. Through conjunctural comparison of Trump’s United States and Putin’s Russia, I reveal authoritarian populism as a pathological sociological mechanism through which imperial decline is distorted into consent to destroy the common world.
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.
