Research

Recent Publications

Books

Crombez, Joel M. 2021. Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method: Toward a Theory and Practice of Critical Socioanalysis. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

• Anxiety, Modern Society, and the Critical Method interrogates the historical intersections of political economy, technology, and anxiety. By analyzing and building upon the tools developed by critical theorists to diagnose the symptoms of modern life—such as alienation, anomie, the Protestant ethic, and repression—Joel Michael Crombez convincingly argues for a revitalization of critical social science to better confront the anxiety of life in modern societies.

  With anxiety typically falling under the purview of psychology and its biomedical approach to treatment, here anxiety is demonstrated to have origins in the totalizing logics of modern society. As such, Crombez provides an interdisciplinary roadmap to diagnose and treat anxiety—which he calls critical socioanalysis—that accounts for the psychosocial complexity of its production.

Peer Reviewed – Articles

Crombez, Joel. (Forthcoming). “Reassessing the Cross-National Relevance of Bourdieu in the Sociology of Art: A Review of Bourdieu in Question.” Sociologie de l'Art.

Crombez, Joel. (2023). “Critical Socioanalysis and the Critique of Religion, or, Why I Read Theory: Gloria Anzaldúa, Jacques Lacan, and Memories of Latin America.” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 40:29-43.

Crombez, Joel M.** and Steven “Stelios” Panageotou. 2020. “The United States of Trump Corp.: The ‘Not Normal/New Normal’ Governing Style of a Personal Brand.” Fast Capitalism, 17(1): 25-52.

Crombez, Joel* and Harry F. Dahms. 2016. “Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Digital Ontotheology: Toward a Rethinking of Science Fiction as Theory.” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, 35(3-4): 104-113.

Peer Reviewed – Governmental/Policy Published Report

Crombez, Joel. (2022). “Shaped by the AI: Planning for a Future With or Without Us?” JRC EU Commission Report: HumAI.

Peer Reviewed – Book Chapters

Crombez, Joel. (2023). “Why Positive Thought Must Be Negated in the Analytic Session: Negative Dialectics as Therapeutic Technique,” in Negativity and Psychoanalysis: Theory and Clinic, edited by Duane Rousselle and Gerard Murphy. Routledge.