Engaging with the World (PDF)

This title reflects the general theme of the 2010 IACR annual conference, held in Padua, Italy, which aimed to provide a fresh view on cultural and structural changes involving Western societies after the world economic crisis of 2008, from the point of view of critical realism.

Global society is often regarded as disrupting identities and blurring boundaries, something that entails giving up ideas of structure and fixity. Globalization supposedly introduces a 'liquid' era of fluidity in which everything is possible, and anything goes. Nevertheless, its current dynamics are developing into a harder reality: wars, economic crisis, the haunting risk of pandemics, the ever-worsening food supply crisis and the environmental challenge. These social facts call for a dramatic shift in the optimistic cosmopolitan mood and the thought that we can build and rebuild ourselves and our world as we please, at least for the most developed countries. The challenges we face produce new forms of social life and individual experience. They also require us to develop new frameworks to analyse emergent contexts, institutional complexes and morphogenetic fields, and new ways to understand human agency and the meaning of emancipation.

In all of this, the challenge is to engage with this "new world" in a meaningful way, a task for which a realist mindset is badly needed. Critical realism provides a strong theoretical framework that can meet the challenge, and the book explores its contribution to making sense of, and coming to terms with, this historical formation.