This episode discusses a few key classical concepts in environmental studies from the book
"Companion to Environmental Studies"
Edited by Noel Castree, Mike Hulme, and James D. Proctor
This episode outlines the final assignment for a sociology course, SOCA3780, which challenges students to analyse value dynamics within a single, chosen sector (such as housing, healthcare, or education). The core purpose is to critically examine how true value—grounded in human agency, liveability, conviviality, and alterity—is distorted into capitalist value and fetish value through the processes of decommonization (reification, fetishization, and appropriation). The assignment requires students to identify key stakeholders, including corporations and community cooperatives, and propose concrete recommonization strategies designed to resist capitalist transformation, primarily through transitions in ownership and governance structures. Illustrative case studies are provided for food production, healthcare, housing, community services, and education, detailing the specific mechanisms through which value is generated and extracted in each sector.
This academic article, authored by S. A. Hosseini and published in 1998, focuses on “The Islamic Reconstructionist Methodology of Studying Quran.” The text outlines a scholarly approach for understanding the Qur'an within contemporary Islamic thought, moving beyond traditional methods. The central purpose of the work is to present an "Islamic Reconstructionist" framework, advocating for a nuanced methodology that considers historical context, intellectual inquiry, and social factors in interpreting the sacred text. By exploring concepts such as hermeneutics and various modes of interpretation, the author seeks to provide a robust scholarly tool for engaging with the Qur'an's meaning and relevance in the modern world.
Dr Hosseini's work presents an Existential Process Theory inspired by the Islamic philosophy of Mulla Sadra, seeking to answer the profound question: "Why is there existence instead of nothing?" Drawing partly on the cosmological challenge raised by physicist Paul Davies, who notes that science cannot explain the origin of physical laws outside of space and time, Hosseini proposes a "Post-Mulla Sadra Existential Process Theory." This theory posits that if God is synonymous with existence, and existence is in a state of dynamic process or evolution, then God must also be evolving toward Absolute Consciousness at a future point called the Singularity. This Absolute Consciousness, or Haqiqat (Truth), then transcends time and space, exerting a guiding influence on the developing reality (Vaqe'iat), emphasising that human moral action is essential for the universe’s evolution toward absolute good.
Value Dynamics in the Agricultural Sector (Podcast version of Session 11 Lecture) by S A Hamed Hosseini
This episode, based on an excerpt from Dr. S. A. Hamed Hosseini, addresses a student's confusion regarding the core distinctions between key concepts in critical theory, particularly those related to the origins of capitalist value. The text systematically differentiates abstraction (broken into primary and secondary stages) from decommonization, explaining that decommonization is the overarching process where life-sustaining sources, such as human creativity, are initially seized and transformed into exploitable resources for profit. Furthermore, the explanation meticulously clarifies the differences between commodity value (Marx's focus on abstract labor time), capitalist value (a broader scope including uncompensated contributions like nature and social reproduction), and fetish value, which exposes the destructive nature of capitalist value by accounting for the lost "true value" resulting from the process of decommonization. Ultimately, the lecturer provides a framework to understand how creative capacity is converted into controllable labor, subsequently refined into abstract labor subject to market forces, and finally contributing to a profit system that conceals its foundational debt to humanity and planetary life.
This episode, based on a chapter from a book titled "Conscientious Sociology" on Ali Shariati's Committed Sociology, undertakes a critical analysis of Shariati's intellectual framework to position him within the broader committed-critical paradigm of social thought. The text argues that complex phenomena like humanity and history cannot be reduced to simple inherent traits, challenging reductionist views in favour of a more nuanced sociological approach. A central theme is Shariati's concept of Tawhid (monotheism), which is presented not merely as a religious belief but as a radical, supra-ideological worldview that seeks to liberate and restructure all human and social institutions by overcoming dualities and contradictions. Crucially, the analysis focuses on extracting Shariati's underlying domain assumptions in ontology and epistemology, demonstrating that his ideas possess a logical coherence rooted in a dialectical relationship between reality and truth, theory and liberating action (praxis).
From True Value to Capitalist and Fetish Value Across Multiple Sectors
Sources of True Value vs Fetish Value in Food Systems
Mapping the actors and forces in the Austrlian food system
In this episode, we dive into "Mastering the Annotated Bibliography: A SOCA2400 Guide," offering a clear, no-nonsense walkthrough of this crucial assessment. Here’s what you'll learn:
• What the annotated bibliography is and why it matters as a stepping-stone to your final essay.
• The bright-line rules on academic integrity and AI usage for this assessment.
• Tips on strategically picking your topic from justice-oriented, democracy-oriented, or ecocentric streams, ensuring you have rich literature to draw from.
• The six essential essay elements you must memorize and use to purposefully read, annotate, and structure your essay.
• A detailed guide on the structure and word count for your introduction, two annotations, and comparative conclusion.
• How to write each part effectively, including the three-move structure for annotations (summary, evaluation, usefulness) and what to include in your introduction and comparative conclusion.
• Advice on finding good sources fast, preferring peer-reviewed academic materials and balancing conceptual with empirical pieces.
• What markers are looking for in your submission.
• Common pitfalls to avoid, such as treating annotations as mere book reports or over-quoting.
• A practical 3-session workflow to manage your time and a quick checklist for submission readiness.
• Mini examples for UBI and worker-owned cooperatives to illustrate key concepts.
• Finally, where to get human help from your convenor, library staff, or university writing support.
This episode equips you to be a careful evaluator, not a cheerleader, ensuring you ace your annotated bibliography.
This podcast delves into the transformative journey of land's value, moving beyond simple market and state dynamics to explore its profound ontological shifts. Drawing on the insights of "Capital Redefined," we unravel the infra-processes of decommonization where land’s inherent worth – its "true value" as "place, territory, and ecological-social life support" – is perverted into "fetish value".In each episode, we will trace how:
• Reification strips land of its agency, converting it from a living territory into "real estate" or a mere object for extraction.
• Fetishization then elevates this reified land-as-asset, normalising its market form and making people existentially dependent on its valuations, often obscuring the loss of "community stability, conviviality, ecological integrity".
• Appropriation locks land into proprietary circuits through "enclosure, privatization, and new frontiers," redirecting its purpose from collective flourishing to private accumulation, as seen in "modern land grabbing" or the UK public land sell-off.
• We will also examine "civilizing meta-mechanisms" – regulations and policies that, while dampening instabilities, often leave the core perversion intact, sometimes even co-opting dissent.
Crucially, the podcast also explores the recommonization of land, a powerful counter-movement that reverses this trajectory. We’ll investigate:
• De-reification, which restores land's "lost subjectivity" and inherent relational qualities, as exemplified by community-supported agriculture and the legal personhood of landscapes like Te Urewera and the Whanganui River.
• De-fetishization, challenging the illusion that commodified nature is the only way to interact with land, often driven by Indigenous land rights and environmental justice campaigns.
• Reclaiming (de-appropriation), which liberates land from private control, fostering collective well-being through initiatives like "Land Back" movements, Community Land Trusts (CLTs), and Scotland's community right-to-buy schemes.
• These originative meta-mechanisms aim to generate "common graces" – measurable improvements in collective capabilities to thrive, such as permanently affordable housing, regenerated ecosystems, and democratic self-determination.
Through contemporary illustrations from "public land sell-offs and platformized housing to Land Back, personhood of place, CLTs, and community buyouts", this podcast asks a fundamental question: "which infra-processes are being activated, toward which final cause?". We aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how land’s value is contested and transformed, exploring pathways towards a regenerative and shared flourishing beyond capital
The episode discusses various challenges and critical perspectives within higher education, particularly concerning racism, diversity, and the impact of neoliberalism. Several sources highlight how systemic racism, deeply embedded in institutional and structural systems, perpetuates disadvantages for Black, Asian, and minority ethnic individuals, including students and staff, often through deficit perspectives, stereotypical prejudices, and the underrecognition of their experiences. The concept of intersectionality, originating from Black feminist scholars, is presented as crucial for understanding how multiple marginalised identities converge. Furthermore, the texts examine the corporatisation of higher education, driven by neoliberal ideologies that prioritise economic efficiency, leading to a two-tier faculty system with precarious employment and the alienation of academic labour. Some sources also explore resistance strategies, such as critical race theory's activist dimension and Marxist critiques of alienation, alongside the specific challenges faced by multiracial students navigating monoracial institutional structures and Muslim students confronting interest-based loan systems.
This podcast discusses the initial results of a literature review of research published since 2010 on the issues of corporatization of higher education and marginalization of culturally and racially diverse academic laborers. Conducted by S A Hamed Hosseini, the review aimed to explore how the literature reflects the way the corporatization of universities reshapes academic work and reproduces inequality.
Since the rise of the neoliberal state, intensified market pressures in many countries have led to education being treated as a business and knowledge as a commodity, fundamentally altering the academic landscape.
The podcast will reveal how these changes disproportionately impact faculty and staff from ethnically, racially, and culturally minoritized groups, particularly at the intersections of gender, class, nationality, and other identities.
Listeners will learn about the key features of the "neoliberal university," including business-like governance, a focus on performance metrics, and a shift from education as a public good to a private investment.
Core themes to be explored include:
• The rise of a two-tier faculty system, or adjunctification, has created a growing "underclass" of contingent instructors disproportionately populated by women and people of color. These academics often face "double marginalization" due to job precarity and identity-based exclusion.
• Inequitable workloads and expectations, such as "cultural taxation," where minoritized faculty undertake disproportionate service related to diversity, often uncredited in promotions. They also face bias and double standards in performance evaluations, frequently needing to "work harder to prove one’s worth."
• The impact of a "student-as-consumer" culture, where faculty are expected to cater to student satisfaction, and student evaluations are heavily weighted despite reflecting race, gender, and accent biases. This dynamic can penalize minoritized instructors whose identities or teaching styles challenge student stereotypes.
• Tokenistic diversity efforts that reduce inclusion to managerial box-checking without addressing deeper power imbalances or institutional racism. Universities may hire minoritized individuals to "add diversity," but then place them in unwelcoming, isolating environments where their merit is questioned.
The podcast will also examine the far-reaching consequences of this intersectional marginalization, including the following:
• Significant psychosocial toll on minoritized academics, leading to chronic stress, burnout, and "racial battle fatigue".
• Slower career progression and higher attrition rates for minoritised scholars, contributing to a "leaky pipeline" in academia.
• The loss of diverse perspectives and contributions to scholarship, which impoverishes intellectual diversity and limits innovation in research.
Ultimately, the podcast highlights that these trends are not inevitable. It will touch on calls for transformative change, including collective action, a re-centring of compassion and social justice, equitable hiring practices, and meaningful inclusion in governance to challenge the market-driven damage and reclaim the university as a genuine site of knowledge and social progress
A Guide on How to Answer the First Question of the Second Assignment in SOCA3780
This episode, "Unpacking Capital: A Student's Guide to the Modular Framework," is your essential companion for mastering the first question of the SOCA3780 Second Assignment. We delve deep into capital's complex and multi-layered architecture, breaking down how it operates not as a single, monolithic entity, but as a modular and processual system.Join us as we demystify the core concepts you need to ace your assignment, including:• Why an Integrative Framework is Key: Discover why no single theory can fully capture capital's dynamics. We'll explore how capital's reality is multi-layered (from observable events to hidden causal mechanisms) and draws value from multiple sources beyond just labour, including social, ecological, and political commons. This complexity necessitates a meta-theoretical platform that pieces together diverse insights.• Marxian Insight: The Core of Exploitation: We begin with Marx, understanding how his theory illuminates capital's "inner dynamics" by focusing on labour exploitation and the generation of surplus value. Learn why this foundational insight, while indispensable, has limitations in fully accounting for capital's wider socio-ecological impacts.• Aristotelian Broadening: Expanding the Sources of Value: See how Aristotle's four causes (material, efficient, formal, final) offer a powerful lens to expand our understanding of capital's value sources beyond labour. This helps us grasp how capitalism exploits ecological and social relations, systematically transforming them into "fetish value" through processes like decommonization.• Critical Realism Deepening: Uncovering Hidden Mechanisms: Dive into the stratified reality proposed by critical realism, distinguishing between the empirical, actual, and real layers. We'll explain retroduction – reasoning backward from observable events to uncover the deeper, often unseen, causal mechanisms and infra-processes (like reification) that underpin capitalism's persistence. This is crucial for understanding "why this rather than that".• Normative Orientation: True Value vs. Fetish Value: Explore the critical distinction between fetish value (capitalist value extracted through decommonization) and true value (life-sustaining value derived from commons freed from exploitative MEED relations). This ethical dimension highlights capitalism's impact on the "good life" and underscores why transformative change is necessary to restore emancipatory possibilities.By integrating these powerful theoretical traditions, you'll gain a robust framework for analysing capital's intricate architecture, exposing its contradictions, and laying the groundwork for imagining alternative, life-affirming social organisations where re-commonization can restore true value. Get ready to confidently tackle Question 1!
Following our last episode on Chris Rogers' "Alternatives to Capitalism," this session is dedicated entirely to Wendy Harcourt's journal article, "The Future of Capitalism: A Consideration of Alternatives."
At its heart, Wendy Harcourt's article reviews three distinct but interconnected approaches to discussing alternatives to today's neoliberal capitalism. Her aim is to explore "alternative visions for a different world order based on the values of ecological, gender, and social justice." She draws on the experiences of various networks and movements globally that are seeking a "more sustainable, harmonious, liveable and just world order."
In her conclusion, Harcourt synthesizes the ideas from all three sections, identifying common threads and the path forward.
• Common Goal: All the reviewed literature aims to "find ways to live with and redefine capitalism aware of social and ecological limits" and to change economic values to include "care and respect for our families, communities, other knowledges, and cultures."
• "Living Economies": This concept proposes redesigning economies so that "life is valued more than money and power resides in ordinary women and men who care for each other, their community, and their natural environment."
• Shared Values: Despite different terminologies (new economics, green new deal, solidarity economies, social enterprise, core economy, care economy, social reproduction, place-based feminist alternatives, and buen vivir), these visions for the future are all "based in beliefs and values that build on the ethics of care, have respect for diversity, and question growth as the driver of economic development."
• Knowledge from Movements: Harcourt emphasizes that these alternatives are not just academic theories but are "coming out of movements as spaces and processes in which knowledges are produced, modified, and mobilized by diverse actors."
• Challenge for Intellectuals: The task is to "work with these plural visions, the tensions within them, acknowledging the context in which they are formed, learning from popular movements and political activism in the co-production of knowledge." This means avoiding the imposition of a single "blueprint" for the future.
• The Paradox: Harcourt acknowledges the challenge that despite strong evidence of capitalism's negative impacts, "people in industrializing countries continue to strive for consumer goods, high-tech tools, and a modern society," illustrating the pervasive "politics of desire at the heart of capitalism."
• Call for New Political Economy: She calls for current and future economists and intellectuals to be open to these "multiple social, political and economic experiments," integrating this knowledge to shape a "new political economy based on the ethics of care, compassion, conviviality, connectedness, and community."
Harcourt concludes by highlighting that these "place-based alternative practices" represent a "shift of consciousness" that can lead to greater economic and social transformations, acting as "transitory practices to overcome the paradox we live in between yearning for alternatives and sticking to the old ways of doing things."
Chris Rogers and Wendy Harcourt's Writings (devised by S A Hamed Hosseini) for students in SOCA2400 UON (commentary writing assignment)
When approaching Chris Rogers' "Alternatives to Capitalism" for your SOCA2400 critical commentary, the most effective strategy is to focus on the core arguments and Rogers' main conclusions rather than getting bogged down in every detail. Rogers aims to provide a clear rationale for moving beyond or reforming capitalism and then evaluates three different paths. Let's break down the chapter's key ideas and Rogers' conclusive statements to help you grasp the essential points: ...
This is an episode designed to help students in SOCA3780 (Leading Social Change) with their first assignment. The primary focus of the podcast is to guide students on how best to write Part C of Assignment 1, while also touching upon the foundational concepts of Part B
This episode helps students in SOCA3780 to prepare their answers to Part B of Assignment 1.
Here is a description for the episode to go with it on Spotify:
Leading Social Change Unpacked: Mastering Assignment 1, Part B – True Value vs. Fetish Value
Welcome to 'Leading Social Change Unpacked', your essential guide for SOCA3780! In this episode, we tackle Assignment 1, Part B: 'True Value vs. Fetish Value: Theoretical Foundations and Implications'. We'll help you build a strong conceptual base by unravelling the core questions for this crucial section.
Why is value a central concept in this framework? We explain how value is not fixed but is historically shaped, socially contested, and politically important. It's essential for linking critique with transformation.
Next, we delve into why it's vital to differentiate between true value and fetish value. This dual structure allows for a deeper social analysis, distinguishing between what sustains life and what serves capital. We define true value as that which is advantageous for the survival, self-fulfilment, and liberation of more-than-human organised life, rooted in commoning, achieved through consensual and collaborative means. This contrasts sharply with fetish value, which is an alienated, perverted, and distorted version of true value that capital captures through decommonisation, even without market transactions like unpaid reproductive labour or ecological appropriation.
We then explore the four distinct sources, or causes, of value, drawing on the Aristotelian framework:
Understand why the theory adopts a broad conception of the commons as the fundamental basis for true value, highlighting how commoning regenerates true value against capital's extractive logic.
Finally, we discuss how true value and fetish value are dialectically intertwined in practice, necessitating their theorisation together within a single integrated framework to account for both domination and emancipation. Tune in to refine your understanding and confidently approach Part B!
