In The Multiple Shadows of Modernity. Strategies of Critique of Contemporary Capitalism

This book is about the relationship between critique and the field of tensions interweaving modernity and capitalism where critique itself has to be practiced and re-thought. In which way can a fruitful connection between social sciences and critique be realized in a context of profound transformations in capitalism and in its mode of interpreting the vocabulary of modernity? Both authors have been facing (directly and indirectly; explicitly and implicitly) this question while working in their different fields of research. In their studies on migration, postcolonial theory, history and contemporary transformations of labour, post-workerism, relationships between labour and social policies, vulnerability and precarity, etc., both authors have been always pressed by the necessity to avoid any idea of neutrally mirroring social reality in theoretical practices. So, regardless of the specific object of a contingent research, the problem of connecting the conditions, meanings and methods of their research to a critical posture has always played a strong role in both authors' work. This book was conceived and elaborated from exchanges and dialogue around these issues between the two authors, with a horizon of possibilities emerging in their view and with the many doubts concerning theoretical and empirical aspects constantly interrogating them. The common and different research questions of the authors, their different disciplinary fields (sociology, political theory and history) and the strongly shared need to escape the iron cage of disciplinary boundaries have been particularly helpful in planning and writing this book together.