Vol. 12 No. 23 (2026): Person, Actor, Subject, Individual: Thinking Empirical Actors Through and Within Social Theory

This issue of Cuadernos de Teoría Social, coordinated by Felipe Ulloa (Universidad de Santiago de Chile), examines the uses of four central categories for understanding social agency: person, actor, subject, and individual. Rather than treating them as equivalents or as mere matters of nomenclature, the contributions gathered here interrogate their genealogies, normative assumptions, and analytical consequences. The dossier thus shifts attention from the presumed attributes of the actor to the social, institutional, material, and relational conditions that make their constitution, sustenance, and recognition possible. Organised around four problems—how to name, what sustains a trajectory, how the relationship with the world changes, and who is admitted as an actor—the issue brings different traditions of social theory into dialogue with research situated in Latin American contexts. Taken together, the articles and reviews show that every conceptual choice enables particular forms of observation, while also setting limits on what can be thought, explained, and recognised.