Abstract: Phenomenology has played an important role in the development of sociological theory. While modern phenomenology’s origins lie in the seminal work of Edmund Husserl, the perspective has, however, never operated as a unified school or system of thought. This article reviews three major traditions of phenomenology: phenomenology as existential philosophy, phenomenology as hermeneutics of being, and social phenomenology. It contrasts the largely extraneous influence of the first two phenomenological traditions on social theorizing with the more intrinsic relationship between social phenomenology and the development of sociological theory in the USA. Then, the article discusses the latter relationship in the context of the intellectual role of the transmitter of the social phenomenological tradition to the USA, Alfred Schutz. In spite of its historical importance, in contemporary social theory, phenomenology is described at best as marginal and at worst as irrelevant and outdated. The article highlights the costs of phenomenology’s exclusion by engaging in a counter-reading of Schutz against canonical representations of his work. There is a continued relevance for social phenomenology to social and cultural theorizing that grounds its objects in the phenomenal and reflexive encounter with the life world. PubDate: 2021-05-05
Abstract: As evidenced by the 2016 US presidential election, conspiracy theories such as birtherism, the belief that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen, have become more impactful on modern-day liberal democracies. This study investigates the consequences of the conspiratorial narratives espoused by populist candidates, arguing that the creation of a narrative involving a “conspiring” establishment figure can positively benefit populist candidates during elections by allowing them to position themselves as defenders of “the people”. Taking the case of Donald Trump and the birther conspiracy theory, empirical testing indicates that by helping to spread birtherism, Donald Trump was able to create for himself a core group of supporters who turned out to vote for him in both the Republican primaries and general election. Moreover, when tests are performed to investigate whether this was a consequence of rallying a right-wing base or mainstreaming the fringe conspiracy theory, significant positive relationships are demonstrated not with more conservative birthers, but instead with the more moderate ones, testifying to the strength of the mainstreaming effect. PubDate: 2021-04-12
Abstract: This article reports on a reality TV series, Sweden’s best employment service, broadcast on Swedish public service television in 2018. The purpose was to investigate ongoing political transformations in the Swedish welfare model. The series focuses not only on unemployment, the unemployed and their life situation but more specifically on the organisation of the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES) as reflected at a local PES office. Informed by a cultural studies approach to the politics of popular culture, the aim of this article is to examine how the makeover is staged in the series. The article focuses on how the unemployed are positioned in the series in a setting of organisational change initiated at the local PES office. The analysis provides insights into how the makeover is staged and initiated in reality TV and illustrates how the unemployed are positioned as willing and able to work and to actively seek opportunities. The unemployed are not the primary target for the makeover in the series. The makeover is primarily directed at the organisation of the PES and its managers. Consequently, unemployment is presented in the series as not only a concern for the individual citizen but also for society. Nine o’clock on channel sixGet the beer and get the chipsDeath is live upon the screenIt’s reality TV!Tankard, R.T.V., 1994 PubDate: 2021-03-30
Abstract: On the basis of empirical material from a city bordering Syria and Turkey, this article aims to situate the city’s emerging landscape of culture and arts in the 2000s within the dynamics of neoliberalizing city-making. It provides a political economy of the city’s “cultural reach” by connecting the dynamics of cultural production to value creating processes in and through urban regeneration to understand when, how, and which groups and sites become de- and re-valorized. It highlights the futility of nation state-city, state-civil society binaries in analysing the power geometry of multiscalar actors involved in the work, efficacy and the potency of cultural networks, institutions, and “cultural diplomacy.” PubDate: 2021-03-16
Abstract: Building on recent work in the sociology of intellectual interventions, the study of cultural boundaries of science, and the role of ideas in politics, the article develops a theory of public epistemologies as argumentative tools people use to support or oppose political positions. Two prominent public epistemologies that have recently crystallized in Italian politics are taken as illustrations, with special attention paid to the role of two academics (an economist and an immunologist) turned public intellectuals. The article argues that the rise of populism in Italy has contributed to unusual alignments between political and epistemological positions, which has made questions about science and expert knowledge much more relevant in contesting and supporting political decisions. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: For more than a decade, Jeffrey Alexander has been developing the cultural sociology of politics as an alternative to rationalist theories of political life. Nearly every part of the 2016 US presidential election offers some vindication for Alexander’s cultural sociology of politics. The election of Donald Trump suggested that performance, stage craft, and messaging might be more fundamental to presidential campaigns. Yet on closer examination, political performance in the 2016 election challenges certain aspects of the cultural sociology of politics. Specifically, the performance of Donald Trump frequently occasioned the violation of the background representations of American political life. This article uses the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump to investigate how a single candidate can be a successful political performer even while profaning a society’s sacred or animating ideals. In the course of this analysis, I argue for a greater appreciation of the value of mundane social interaction in political performance. In liberal and democratic societies, the value of individualism means that the principles of social interaction will be as important to political performance as the ability to channel other principles and ideals. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: Throughout its long history, the Walt Disney Company has repeatedly relied on a patriarchal idealization of femininity to craft its animated female protagonists. In Disney films, male interests, expectations, power, and leadership are consistently valued over those of female characters, who must submit unquestioningly to male direction. Internet reviewers and respected news sources alike claimed that Judy Hopps, Zootopia’s bunny cop protagonist, and Moana’s royal Polynesian title character, are independent, “feminist” heroines who counter this patriarchal narrative template. While critics argue that Judy and Moana defy Disney’s patriarchal template, these two films actually represent a postfeminist, rather than a feminist, reimagining of Disney’s template which resigns both protagonists to narratives that celebrate and center male power. Judy Hopps and Moana act independently, but each woman is relegated to a tenuous relationship with a domineering male character whom she must defer to and emotionally nurture. Intentionally or not, Disney empowers Judy and Moana only to the extent that both women manage and control themselves, rather than allowing them to exercise power to contest the relationships and societies which oppress them. Thus, these films offer a tepid acknowledgment of the problems with Disney’s traditional depiction of femininity, but they ultimately reveal that female empowerment exists in the Disney Co.’s narratives only when incubated in a toxic, platonic relationship with a male character. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: This article interrogates narrow forms of nationalism and nativist ideologies that are hidden beneath post-colonial African political leader statements and rhetoric about reversing colonial imbalances. The focus is on Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga spearheaded by Robert Mugabe during the last ten years of his presidency. An analysis of the linguistic and discursive aspects of economic nationalisation, land reform and indigenisation programmes in Zimbabwe—also known as the Third Chimurenga—enables us to see the elements of policy discord and inconsistencies that characterised the second half of Robert Mugabe’s nearly four-decade rule. The argument is that the reified and reductionist framing of the Third Chimurenga resulted in two unintended consequences: (i) alienating the majority of the very same black people that the policy sought to empower and (ii) diminishing opportunities for beneficiaries to contribute towards realisation of the ideals and aspirational goals of pushing back the frontiers of colonially inherited social and economic inequalities. I conclude by suggesting that Robert Mugabe’s language and discursive rhetoric around social transformation in Zimbabwe betray unhelpful commitment to political exigencies at the expense of sustainable economic empowerment of ordinary men and women. PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: This article examines the institution of celebrity within academia. Academic celebrity has parallels with the celebrity seen in the wider world, though it is born of conditions unique to the fields of higher education and research and exhibits its own special characteristics. Whilst the scholarly prominence of academics can be based on more or less impersonal measures, especially citation statistics, academic celebrity, like popular celebrity, has emotional and subjective dimensions that call for non-subjective analysis. That challenge is met in this article by pointing to the cultural and institutional underpinnings of the phenomenon. In outlining some of academic celebrity’s defining features, we explore the critical difference between scholarly prominence, which is based on the perception of an academic’s excellence within their field, and celebrity, which incorporates adulation from colleagues and students. In reviewing the literature on the subject, we find models elaborating the ways in which modernity, in contrast to Elias’s court society (Rojek), or the world of aristocratic artistic patronage (Bourdieu), creates the conditions for the adulation of celebrities and the emergence of celebrity as an institution. We also find views critical of both the vulgarising effect of celebrity on literary and artistic taste (Coser), and its self-perpetuating character (Boorstin, Merton). Finally, we examine aspects of academic celebrity’s institutionalisation: the dynamic that drives the creation of new fields of specialisation within which academic celebrity is embedded, and the ‘managerial university’, which is said to generate and sustain it (Moran). PubDate: 2021-03-01
Abstract: North et al. (2009) argue that accounting for different development outcomes requires understanding how different societies manage violence. Almost all societies have been limited-access orders where elites constrain violence to preserve their rents. Alternatively, in open-access orders, violence is constrained by a government characterized by widespread political participation. Open-access societies were the first cases of sustained economic development; almost all of them have been Western European or offshoots. Understanding why is important. North et al. elaborate on three necessary conditions for achieving open access: (1) rule of law for elites, (2) support for perpetually-lived organizations, and (3) centralization and consolidation of violence. These constitute the “doorstep” to an open-access order. I argue that significant progress towards this doorstep was affected by the Carolingians of the early medieval era. I emphasize their large-scale distributions of confiscated/conquered lands to vassals, cultivation of bonds with the Church, and regularization of assemblies. The Carolingians introduced governance innovations that impersonalized relationships between elites and encouraged their enforcement under the rule of law. PubDate: 2021-01-07 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09393-1
Abstract: Heritage is increasingly promoted as a tool for economic and social development to help rebuild societies that have suffered conflict and deep social trauma. Heritage diplomacy is an emergent form of cultural relations that forms a ‘contact zone’ between different stakeholders and divergent expectations. This paper explores some aspects of this field of heritage diplomacy and develops a basic typology by contrasting the tension between the uses of ‘charismatic heritage diplomacy’ and more ‘careful heritage diplomacy’. It examines differences between local realities and international expectations of heritage by bringing together two case studies: one from a Creative Europe–funded project where civil society actors develop strategies for working with the difficult heritage that lies behind nationalist myths, and the other from a British Council–funded programme dealing with endangered heritage in the MENA region. Critical studies of heritage-making often pitch the local against the international, with grassroot activities contrasted with international rhetoric surrounding heritage places, objects and practices. However, this dichotomy can mask other actors and social dynamics, not least the subtleties of how the collective traumas of conflict play out in the cultural field. The idea of heritage diplomacy as a ‘contact zone’ (Clifford 1997) highlights that heritage-making in (post-)conflict cultural relations is an ontological encounter between international agents and the traumatised communities for whom the stakes are, inevitably, higher. Mediated through the transnational best practices of heritage professionals, and through the visible pragmatism of civil society heritage activists, the impacts of heritage-making nevertheless remain complicated and entangled. PubDate: 2021-01-05 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09391-3
Abstract: Increasingly, French citizens are prosecuted for the ‘crime of solidarity’: hosting undocumented migrants in defiance of state laws forbidding it (and subsequently named ‘solidarity delinquents’). This paper explores contemporary ‘crimes of solidarity’ by investigating why indignant subjects defy the state and, in so doing, constitute themselves as citizens. Drawing on the concepts of hospitality and governmentality, the paper examines France’s vexed relation with hospitality alongside a particular mode of governing the state as a home (‘domopolitics’) in relation to citizenship and migrancy. Hospitality as a governmentality rationalises processes of classification and identification that determine which mobile presences in the home are least disruptive to its social and moral order. Yet French ‘solidarity delinquents’ are savvy to the instrumentalisation and politicisation of hospitality. I show they too have a use for politicising hospitality and themselves. Mobilising these ideas through Isin’s (2008) ‘acts of citizenship’ framework, I capture a citizenly response to domopolitical rule: hospitality becomes the terrain upon which republican citizens demonstrate liberté, égalité and especially fraternité, will not be suspended in the home. More broadly, the hospitality and citizen identity that is at present claimed must be seen in one crucial respect: state and dissident see in hospitality a tactic for realising a conception of Frenchness and citizenship, albeit in two competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, ways. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09355-7
Abstract: This article reflects on the relationship between time and the figure of the citizen, where the citizen is understood in relational terms to the migrant. The article examines a stalled or interrupted flow of time that characterises the experience of certain migrants and citizens alike. This is time experienced as waiting for the fulfillment of citizenship. The article goes on to show how a progressive temporal narrative of citizenship-to-come obscures the effective denial of citizenship. While citizenship remains a key aspiration for those who lack its full or partial protections, it may not represent the ultimate horizon for struggles concerned with questions of border justice. With this proposition in mind, the article speculates on alternative horizons that may be emerging organically within struggles that refuse the citizen/migrant divide as a basis for imagining collective political futures. PubDate: 2020-12-01 DOI: 10.1007/s10767-020-09358-4
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