Harnessing the empowering ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche to read the human condition of modern existence through a sociological lens, Employing Nietzsche’s Sociological Imagination: How to Understand Totalitarian Democracy confronts the realities of how modernity and its utopianisms affect one’s ability to purpose existence with self-authored meaning. By critically assessing the ideals of modern institutions, the motives of their pundits, and their political ideologies as expressions born from the social decay of exhausted dreams and projects of modernity, Jack Fong assembles Nietzsche’s existential sociological imagination to empower actors to emancipate the self from such duress. Illuminating the merits of creating new meaning for life affirmation by overcoming struggle with one’s will to power, Fong reveals Nietzsche’s horizons for actualized and empowered selves, selves to be liberated from convention, groupthink, and cultural scripts that exact deference from society’s captive audiences.

This handbook presents a comprehensive survey of the formation and transformation of nationalism in 15 East and Southeast Asian countries. Written by a team of international scholars from different backgrounds and disciplines, this volume offers new perspectives on studying Asian history, society, culture, and politics, and provides readers with a unique lens through which to better contextualise and understand the relationships between countries within East and Southeast Asia, and between Asia and the world. It highlights the latest developments in the field and contributes to our knowledge and understanding of nationalism and nation building. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book examines a diverse set of topics that include theoretical considerations on nationalism and internationalism; the formation of nationalism and national identity in the colonial and postcolonial eras; the relationships between traditional culture, religion, ethnicity, education, gender, technology, sport, and nationalism; the influence of popular culture on nationalism; and politics, policy, and national identity. It illustrates how nationalism helped to draw the borders between the nations of East and Southeast Asia, and how it is re-emerging in the twenty-first century to shape the region and the world into the future. The Routledge Handbook of Nationalism in East and Southeast Asia is essential reading for those interested in and studying Asian history, Social and Cultural history, and modern history.

Explores the contemporary crisis of biblical interpretation by examining modern and postmodern 'hermeneutics of suspicion'.

Anas Karzai’s timely book emphasizes how modern progressive sociological and political thought including the work of Weber, Adorno, and Foucault, is based on an often unacknowledged debt to Nietzsche. Karzai’s book highlights how Nietzsche’s observation of the human condition in modernity is to be read as an affirmative critique.

This open access book offers a unique and refreshing view on working with social theory in higher education. Using engaging first-person accounts coupled with critical intellectual analysis, the authors demonstrate how theory is grappled with as part of an ongoing practice rather than a momentary disembodied encounter. In a structure that creates a space for relational dialogue, each chapter is followed by a response from another author, demonstrating the varied interpretive possibilities of social theory. Collectively the authors invite the reader to engage with them in questioning the usefulness of social theory in higher education teaching and research, in considering its possibilities and limits, and in experiencing the opportunity it offers to understand ourselves and our work differently. Written in a way that is scholarly yet accessible, the contributors explore how social theories can be used to think through issues that are emerging as key social and political concerns in higher education and beyond. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and early-career academics, as well as established scholars.

Containing several innovative interventions in the areas of queer theory, political economy, critical race theory, labour history, hip-hop aesthetics, social movements studies, science and technology studies, pedagogy, and ludic studies, this volume pushes Nietzsche studies in new directions.

This book provides a rationale for a Christian sociology, challenging the materialist epistemology of contemporary sociology, which provides only a limited understanding of social behavior. Developing a history of the origins of sociology that recognizes the centrality of Christianity to the discipline’s development, it considers the secularization thesis and questions surrounding positivism, scientism and postmodernism, as well as engaging with the work of a range of figures including Margaret Archer, Robert Bellah, Peter Berger, Hans Joas, Thomas Luckmann, David Martin, and Christian Smith. A critique of modern sociology, which argues that a Christian approach provides a better explanation than contemporary paradigms of the polarization occurring today in American society, The Not So Outrageous Idea of a Christian Sociology will appeal to scholars and students with interests in sociological theory, research methods and epistemology, and the sociology of religion.