Contemporary societies are marked by deep inequalities grounded in collective failures to recognize the histories, needs, and experiences of marginalized social groups. What are the strategies that can help individuals become more responsive to social realities and perspectives that differ significantly from their own? In Reimagining Sympathy,Recognizing Difference: Insights from Adam Smith, Millicent Churcherattends to recent debates over the imagination as a resource for social and political reform, and highlights the central relevance of Adam Smith’s voice to these debates. Smith, best known for his work on economics, may seem an unlikely figure to draw upon in this context. However, his nuanced account of ‘sympathy’—conceived as an imaginative and reflective capacity that develops within and through social experience—greatly enriches the role of imagination in fostering mutual understanding and solidarity among a diverse citizenry. Churcher critically explores and extends Smith’s view that if sympathy is to bind people together across their differences rather than divide them, it requires work at the level of individual practice, as well as the support of wider social structures. By drawing Smith into conversation with contemporary debates in social and political theory, this monograph addresses the pressing question of what is required from individuals and institutionsto remedy abject failures to recognize and respond ethically to difference.

Why are women so frequently targeted with hate speech online and what can we do about it? Psychological explanations for the problem of woman-hating overlook important features of our social world that encourage latent feelings of hostility toward women, even despite our consciously-held ideals of equality. Louise Richardson-Self investigates the woman-hostile norms of the English-speaking internet, the ‘rules’ of engagement in these social spaces, and the narratives we tell ourselves about who gets to inhabit such spaces. It examines the dominant imaginings (images, impressions, stereotypes, and ideas) of women that are shared in acts of hate speech, highlighting their ‘emotional stickiness’. But offering strategies through which we may reimagine our norms of online engagement, the stories that justify those norms, and the logic that makes sense of it all, this book shows how we can create alternative visions of what it means to take up online space as a woman and to ensure that women are seen as entitled to be there. By exploring aspects of ‘social imaginaries’ theory and applying it to the problem of hate speech against women online, this book illuminates why woman-hating has become such a prominent feature of this environment and how we can make these spaces safer for women.

Formal and informal institutions structure our social interactions by giving rise to normative expectations and patterns of collective behaviour. This collection grapples with how affect, imagination, and embodiment can operate to either constrain or enable the justice of institutions and the experiences of specific social identities. This anthology explores the myriad ways institutions work to systematically disadvantage people with particular identities whilst privileging others, and considers the legal, political, and normative interventions that might serve to promote a more just society. Taken together, the chapters represent the scope of existing research within institutional theory, affect theory, race theory, and theories of social imaginaries. Across a range of topics (human rights, racial and sexual violence, transitional justice and democratic movements) this collection critically assesses the extent to which theorists have attended to the conjoined influence of the imagination, embodiment, and affective phenomena on processes of institutional change that aim to achieve social justice. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Angelaki.

Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society. It explores how science permeates shared human consciousness, to produce effects that ripple through the entire social body to restructure relations between persons, discourses, institutions, and power in ways which we are barely conscious of. The book shows how science, through its entwinement with power, discourses, and practices, presents certain social arrangements as natural and certain courses of action as beyond question. By arguing for a non-reductive, liberal scientific naturalism that sees science as one form of rationality amongst others, it opens possibilities for thought and action beyond scientific knowledge. Examining the shifting relations between science and other social institutions, discourses and power, the book addresses the narrowing of freedom by the instrumental modes of thinking that accompany scientific and technological change. McIntyre simultaneously raises the question of the good life and the question of a philosophical critique both directed towards science and, at the same time, shaped by, and responsive to it. By analysing the works of Foucault and Habermas in terms of their social, political, and historical contexts it reveals the two thinkers as linked by a commitment to the Enlightenment tradition and its emancipatory telos. The significant differences between the two are seen to result from Foucault’s radicalization of this tradition, a radicalization which is, at the same time, implicit within the Enlightenment project itself.

Through a curated selection of papers written over four decades by one of Australia’s leading philosophers, this collection demonstrates the impact of Continental philosophy on philosophical thought in Australia. The development of specific philosophical problems, over a period of more than forty years by a philosopher whose first training was ‘pre-continental’, shows that it is possible to achieve interaction between ‘continental’ and ‘pre-continental’ methods in philosophy, even while recognizing their distinctiveness. These essays ‘work towards’ continental philosophy in the ways they pay attention to language, to how we experience things and are experienced by others, and to the structures of language and power that frame what it is possible to say and to hear, to write and to read.

The interwoven futures of humanity and our planet are under threat. Urgent action, taken together, is needed to change course and reimagine our futures.

The interwoven futures of humanity and our planet are under threat. Urgent action, taken together, is needed to change course and reimagine our futures. Education, long acknowledged as a powerful force for positive change, has new, urgent and important work to do. This report, two years in the making, invites governments, institutions, organizations, and citizens around the world to forge a new social contract for education that will help us build peaceful, just, and sustainable futures.