Social & Political Theory Cluster

Overview
Cluster Themes
Cluster Projects
Cluster Members
Collaborations

The social and political challenges we face now are also theoretical challenges, demanding both critical awareness and normative judgement.

The climate emergency, war, revolution, inequality, intolerance, the abuse of power. These all pose normative questions: what is the right thing to do, what good can we hope to bring about, what evils must we avoid? And our attempts to answer these questions are also rational efforts to remove error, confusion, and bias.

At the same time, the very idea of rationality itself is, in complex ways, tied up with the ethical challenges we are tasked with addressing. Theorizing can serve our efforts to think clearly about pressing social and political challenges, invite us to consider our concepts critically, and assess whose interests they serve.

The Social and Political Theory Research Cluster brings together academics working in normative and critical theory. Researchers within this group are actively involved with national and international collaborators both in research studies and in research working groups. The Cluster members have extensive experience in research supervision, and publish in leading international journals and publishing houses.

The main fields of expertise of the Social and Political Theory Research Cluster are as follows:

Critical Social Theory
Cultural Theory
Decolonial Theory
Feminist Social and Political Theory
Historical Perspectives on Political and Social Thought
Moral and Political Philosophy

Contact

For further information on current and future research activities of this group, research supervision and visiting scholar opportunities, please contact the leads:

Dr Diana Stypinska: diana.stypinska@universityofgalway.ie

Dr Allyn Fives: allyn.fives@universityofgalway.ie

The activities of the Social and Political Research Cluster centre around the following themes:

1. Power and Dissent

Key research areas: authority; democracy; digital subjectification; ideas in emancipatory practice; toleration; politics of critique and criticality; politics of historiography and commemoration.

2. Freedom, Equality and Human Flourishing

Key research areas: akrasia (weakness of will); Aristotelian ethics; care; human rights; intersectional perspectives on equality; rationality and moral responsibility.

3. Epistemology and Methods

Key research areas: creative methods; methods for the history of political and social thought; moral dilemmas; onto-epistemology; post-structuralist discourse theory; praxeology.

1. Power and Dissent

‘Fugitive freedom and the aesthetics of power relations’

Publications:

Ryan, K. and Harlow, N. (2025) ‘Beyond the Sovereign Self’: A dialogical review of Coloured by Weather by Orla Whelan. Irish Journal of Sociology. (online ahead of print October 30^th: https://doi.org/10.1177/079160352513859).
Ryan, K. (2025) Enclosure and Capture: The Paradox of Opacity/Legibility. FIELD A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, # 30 (online: https://tinyurl.com/3nrnpnd9)
Ryan, K. (2025) The power of critique in the time of emergency: on normative fiction and critical fiction. In: Political Power and Crisis: Essays on Political Power Dynamics in Turbulent Times. Gallarotti (Ed). Routledge.
Ryan, K. (in press) Losing power in the hold of (anti-) Blackness: Fugitive freedom and the art of refusal. Handbook on Political Power. G. Gallarotti and M. Haugaard (eds). Edward Elgar.
Ryan, K. (2024) From critical theory to critical fabulism: Aesthetics in a minor key. Irish Journal of Sociology, 32(3): 272-284. https://doi.org/10.1177/07916035241256222
Ryan, K. (2024) Homo mimeticus, Wayward lives, The biology of adversity and resilience: Early life adversity and the politics of fabulation. Constellations 32(1): 169-183.

‘Curating childhood: Encounters with paternalism’

Publications:

Ryan, K. (in press) Curating (entangled) childhood(s): Narrating the past/extracting the future. Cultural Dynamics.
Ryan, K. (forthcoming) Curating childhood(s) / encounters with paternalism: A comparative analysis of the Young V&A Museum, London, and Boys in the Making at the NCAD Gallery, Dublin. Museums and Social Issues.

‘The dilemma of authority’

Publications:

Fives, A. (2026) The Dilemma of Authority. Manchester: Manchester University Press (Under contract).
Fives, A. (2024) ‘Problems some deliberative democrats have with authority,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism. 17pp. doi.org/10.1177/01914537241284531
Fives, A. (2024) ‘The Dilemma of Authority,’ Philosophia, 52(1): 117–33. 10.1007/s11406-024-00715-7
Fives, A. (2023) ‘On the Pluralist Critique of Authority,’ Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review. 18pp. https://doi:10.1017/S0012217322000452
Fives, A. (2023) ‘Authority, Plurality, and Anarchist Scepticism,’ Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 62, 395–412. doi:10.1017/S0012217322000452
Fives, A. (2022) ‘Authority, Excluded Reasons, and Moral Conflict,’ Disputatio: International Journal of Philosophy, 14(67): 353–74. https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2022-0017
Fives, A. (2022) ‘Membership, Obligation, and the Communitarian Thesis,’ Theoria, 88(6): 1196–1210. https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.12434

‘Toleration as a focal point of moral conflict’

Publications:

Fives, A. (2022) ‘Edmund Burke’s Value Pluralism,’ The European Legacy, 27(6): 583–600. https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2022.2041287
Fives, A. (2021) ‘A Value Pluralist Defense of Toleration. Philosophia, 49 (1): 235–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00217-2

‘Politics of historiography and commemoration’

Publications:

Garrett, P. M. (2022) ‘Creating ‘Common Sense’ Responses to the ‘Unmarried Mother’ in the Irish Free State’ in K O’Donnell, M. O’Rourke and J. M. Smith (eds.) REDRESS: Ireland’s Institutions and Transitional Justice, Dublin: UCD Press, pp. 182-196.
Reilly, N., Tom Kettle’s Ireland, 1906-1916 (monograph/intellectual biography in progress).
Reilly, N., Tom Kettle: ‘Poet, Essayist, Patriot’- A Fresh Overview of an Extraordinary Life in the Service of Ireland, October 9th, 2025. (Background paper prepared for the Kettles Heritage Society (Fingal County) for a submission to the Office of Public Works).
Reilly, N. (2021) 'Tom Kettle - A Reappraisal' in History Ireland, Vol. 29, No. 1 (JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021), pp. 26-29.

‘Politics of critique and criticality’

Publications:

Garrett, P. M. (2021) ‘“A World to Win”: In Defence of (Dissenting) Social Work—A Response to Chris Maylea’, British Journal of Social Work, 51 (4): 1131-1149.
Garrett, P. M. (2021) Dissenting Social Work: Critical Theory, Resistance and Pandemic, London, Routledge (2021).
Garrett, P. M. (2023) Social Work and Common Sense: A Critical Examination. London, Routledge.
Garrett, P. M. (2025) ‘The proposal from Haifa that the global definition of social work ought to be “reconstructed”: A critical commentary’, British Journal of Social Work, 55 (6), pp. 3255–3273.
Garrett, P. M. (2026) ‘Hegemony and settler colonial subjectivities. The censure of the Israeli Union of Social Workers (IUSW) by the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW)’, Critical Social Policy, 46 (1), pp. 115–136.
Stypinska, D. (2020) On The Genealogy of Critique: Or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant. Abington: Routledge.
Stypinska, D. (2022) ‘Keyboard Revolutionaries’ in Social Media, Truth and the Care of the Self: On the Digital Technologies of the Subject. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 63-82.
Stypinska, D. (2023) ‘Confronting time out of joint… – On economic rationality and imagination’ in Journal of Classical Sociology, 23(2): 181–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X231153786
Stypinska, D. and Boland, T. (eds) (2024) ‘Special Issue: Critical Theory Today: One hundred years of the Frankfurt School’ in Irish Journal of Sociology, 32(3). (https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/irja/32/3)
Stypinska, D. and Boland, T. (2024) ‘Spectres of Critique: The Nostalgia of Social Transformation’ in Irish Journal of Sociology, 32(3): 343–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/07916035241295522
Stypinska, D. (2025) ‘Digital Agitation and (Re)Activism’ in Social Media Frenzies: Digitalized Agitation and Social Change. Abington: Routledge, pp. 76-92.

‘Digital subjectification and social change’

Publications:

Garrett, P. M. (2025) ‘Magic moments: AI and the “disappearance” of social work ethics?’, British Journal of Social Work, published online 30 October https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcaf230
Stypinska, D. (2020) ‘The Ecstasy of Critique’ in On The Genealogy of Critique: Or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant. Abington: Routledge, pp. 135-154.
Stypinska, D. and Rossi, A. (2021) ‘White Christmas: Technologies of the Self in the Digital Age’ in Philosophical Reflections on Black Mirror, Ed. Shaw, D., Marshall, K. and Rocha, J. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 97-113.
Stypinska, D. (2022) Social Media, Truth and the Care of the Self: On the Digital Technologies of the Subject. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stypinska, D. (2024) ‘Pastorate Digitalized: Social Media and Subjectification’ in Theory, Culture & Society. OnlineFirst: https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764231216896
Stypinska, D. (2025) Social Media Frenzies: Digitalized Agitation and Social Change. Abington: Routledge.

2. Freedom, Equality and Human Flourishing

‘Moral freedom and the problem of akrasia (weakness of will)’

Publications:

Fives, A. (2024) ‘Whether akrasia is simply an error in practical reasoning: Elizabeth Anscombe on brute facts, Aristotle, and intention’, Esercizi Filosofici, special issue “Anscombe and Practices: Between Philosophy and Social Science”, 19: 61–78. DOI: 10.13137/1970-0164/37388

‘Intersectional perspectives on equality’

Adebayo, Oluwatumininu O., and Scriver, S. (2025) ‘Negotiating Nollywood: Women, Violence, and Postfeminist Sensibilities in the Nigerian Film Industry’ Gender, Work & Organization: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.70049
Reilly, N., Khandoker, N., and Fairchild, S. (2026), ‘Radical Hope in the Nexus of Migration and Gender: Researching and Teaching with Critical Pedagogies, Situated Intersectionality and Decolonial Feminism’ in J. Freedman, N. Sahraoui and E. Tyszler eds., Postcolonial and Intersectional Approaches to Migration (Bristol University Press, forthcoming).
Khandoker, N. and Reilly, N. (2025) ‘Bordering, Belonging, Beyond Survival: Critical Readings of Intersectionality in the Nexus of GBV and Migration in Ireland’, special issue of the Irish Journal of Sociology ("Migrant Women and their Experiences of Gender-based Violence: New Perspectives on Cultural, Societal, and Political Challenges”) (May 2025). https://doi.org/10.13025/29721
Reilly, N. Bjørnholt, M. & Tastsoglou, E. (2022). ‘Vulnerability, Precarity and Intersectionality: A Critical Review of Three Key Concepts for Understanding Gender-Based Violence in Migration Contexts’ in J. Freedman, N. Sahraoui, & E. Tastsoglou, eds., Gender-Based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches (pp. 29-56). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-07929-0_2

‘The politics of care’

Publications:

Garrett, P. M. (2023) ‘Bowlby, attachment and the potency of a “received idea”’, British Journal of Social Work, 53 (1): 100-117.
Garrett, P. M. (2023) ‘Social work and the “social doctor”: Bowlby, social reproduction and “common sense”’, British Journal of Social Work, 53 (1): 587-603.
Zechner, M., Näre, L., Karsio, O., Olakivi, A., Sointu, L. Hoppania, H-K. & Vaittinen, T. (2022) The Politics of Ailment: A New Approach to Care. Policy Press.

3. Epistemology and Methods

‘The reality of dilemmatic conflict’

Publications:

Fives, A. (2025) ‘Regret for the Defeated Directive,’ Analytic Philosophy. DOI: 10.1111/phib.12366
Fives, A. (2024) ‘Moral obligation as a conclusive reason: On Bernard Williams’ critique of the morality system,’ Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy. 10.1007/s11245-023-09990-7
Fives, A. (2023) ‘The Freedom To Do As We Please: A Strong Value Pluralist Conceptualization of Negative Freedom,’ The Journal of Value Inquiry, 57:671–86 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-021-09854-6
Fives, A. (2019) ‘The Freedom of Extremists: Pluralist and Non-pluralist Responses to Moral Conflict,’ Philosophia, 47(3): 663–80.

‘Onto-epistemology and discourse theory’

Publications:

Hoppania, H-K. (2024) “Social Theory for Quantum Times: Discourse Meets Agential Realism”. Journal of Social Ontology 10 (1). Vienna, Austria: 46-66. https://doi.org/10.25365/jso-2024-7856. H

➤ Centre for Global Women’s Studies

External Collaborations

➤ Social Theory Study Group of the Sociological Association of Ireland

➤ Modern Liberty Working Group of the Political Studies Association

➤ All-Island Seminar Series in Political Theory of the Political Theory Network (Political Studies Association of Ireland)

➤ ENLIGHT Research Symposium Working Group: ‘Gender and Catholicism’, University of Bratislava, University of Basque Country, University of Galway. (in formation)

➤ Centre for Justice and Values, Trinity College, Dublin