The article presents a sociological study of promise-to-marry 'rape' cases in India to illuminate the inner lives of intimacies. It argues that promise-to-marry cases cannot be understood merely as instances of deceptive sex, wherein the consent of the victim is vitiated by a false promise of marriage as a pretext for sexual intercourse. Rather, through an ethnographic study of promise-to-marry cases in Delhi, it explicates the myriad forms of harms including explicit physical and sexual violence, infringement of reproductive autonomy, economic fraud, emotional manipulation and abandonment experienced by women in intimate and acquaintance contexts. In doing this, it presents a methodological insight in terms of studying intimacy through sites of violence complaints. It also foregrounds victim narratives from the field to highlight how caste-endogamous marriage, intimacy and sexuality remain intertwined in the socio-cultural context of India, even as youth forge romantic ties across kinship and community boundaries, more than before. It is argued that promise-to-marry cases provide an unexplored but useful avenue for understanding women's experiences of romance and coercive control in pre-marital relationships in India. The article thereby contributes to the fields of sociology of law, feminist literature on domestic and intimate partner violence, and sociological studies on intimacy and marriage.
Advantaged young people may engage in transgressive or non-conformist subcultural practices usually associated with disadvantaged youth. When undertaken from privileged positions, however, these practices can carry markedly different meanings, costs and rewards. Sociological research on youth subcultures has illuminated the marginalised side of this dynamic, analysing deviant and oppositional practices as collective responses to blocked opportunities and exclusion from mainstream recognition. However, why young people with more secure and legitimate routes to recognition and success may nonetheless be drawn to risk-bearing subcultural practices remains under-theorised. This article addresses this asymmetry by reframing advantaged youths' subcultural participation as a specific, transgressive form of boundary-crossing cultural omnivorousness, and by analysing advantaged and disadvantaged youth within a field-oriented framework. Extending Bourdieu's logic of condescension into the domain of risk-bearing participation, it proposes the concept of transgressive condescension, to capture how privileged actors can convert visible transgression into recognition and advantage. This reveals a double misrecognition: the visibility of privileged transgression obscures the capital buffers that make such risk-taking manageable, while the absence of such buffers, which renders similar practices acutely costly for disadvantaged youth, is also obscured. The article thus develops the Bourdieusian turn in subcultural studies towards a more symmetrical analysis of participation across social positions, and extends cultural omnivore research beyond taste and consumption by treating transgressive boundary-crossing as a risk-bearing practice, whose authenticity effects, costs and convertibility are unequally structured by class position and capital configuration.
Shadow education has become a defining feature of contemporary schooling systems, yet dominant explanations continue to emphasise access, market expansion, and examination pressure. This article advances a sociological account of how shadow education becomes culturally normalised within contexts formally committed to public educational equality. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of illusio, I conceptualise Greece as a dialectically hybrid neoliberal-traditionalist educational field, in which market logics of optimisation and competition interact with moral obligations of family sacrifice, kinship duty, and educational honour. The article draws on a qualitatively driven mixed-methods study conducted in rural Pella, Greece, combining an online survey of 110 individuals who had completed secondary education within the previous five years with 24 semi-structured interviews (14 students and 10 tutors). Survey findings informed participant selection and identified broader participation patterns, while interviews examined how tutoring became culturally meaningful and morally necessary. The findings show that shadow education functions as a culturally expected norm across all capital positions. However, inequality is reproduced less through differential participation than through the quality, prestige, and strategic convertibility of tutoring. I argue that this produces a distinct mechanism of symbolic violence within universal participation, whereby unequal pedagogic infrastructures are misrecognised as stronger work ethic, greater seriousness, and deserved merit. Comparatively, Greece emerges as a familistic Southern European mass-participation shadow education regime, where neoliberal educational rationalities are culturally re-encoded through kinship obligation and welfare fragility. More broadly, the article contributes to debates on educational inequality by showing how marketised hierarchies become culturally experienced as necessary, legitimate, and deserved.
This article develops the concept of total self-commodification to account for a form of platform labour whose unit of extraction is the creator's continuous intimate self. The empirical case is OnlyFans, the largest subscription-based adult content platform. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews with creators in France, Belgium and French-speaking Switzerland conducted between September 2024 and March 2025, and a documentary analysis of fourteen versions of the platform's terms of service across 2019 to 2025, the article makes three contributions to the sociology of platform work. First, situating the analysis within recent scholarship on relational labour and its economic-sociological genealogy, platformised sex work and payment-ecosystem governance of adult content platforms, the article specifies the value-form through which the self functions as enterprise: a single platform-mediated feedback loop in which subscriber dynamics, self-presentation and earnings become operationally indistinguishable. Second, the article reframes structural vulnerability as a mechanism of platform governance, anchoring the claim in the precarity-theory tradition and in recent work on the payment-processor regime that conditions adult platform operations. Third, the analysis offers an infrastructural intensification of the Foucauldian account of the entrepreneurial self: on OnlyFans the regulatory ideal of the enterprising self becomes operationally indistinguishable from the labour process itself, while creators' own recognition of their activity as work remains partial and oscillating: an incompleteness, we argue, that the platform's economic model actively exploits.
How does imperial knowledge production operate when Western media coverage of a Global South subject is predominantly admiring instead of hostile? This article addresses that question through critical discourse analysis of sixty-three Anglo-American news articles covering the Chad-Libya conflict of the 1980s, the 'Toyota War'. Despite Chad's decisive military victory and broadly favourable coverage, systematic coding reveals that Chadian political subjectivity was structurally withheld. Chadian figures appeared as sources in 41.3 per cent of articles but were granted political or strategic interpretive function in only 6.3 per cent: interpretive exclusion despite presence. Western or French officials served as primary interpretive sources in 77.8 per cent of articles, and France was positioned as sovereign arbiter in 82.5 per cent. Three interlocking devices produced this structure: selective valorization, which absorbed political relations into a commodity object; an interpretive hierarchy that routed authority through Western institutional channels; and Orientalist fascination, which made exclusion pleasurable and thereby imperceptible. The article develops a three-tiered model of differential life-worth (Libyan soldiers, Chadian soldiers, and Chadian civilians each constituted through distinct textual genres) and argues that valence, the positive or negative tone of coverage, is an insufficient analytic register: the imperial operation runs through how subjects are constituted, not through valence alone.
ABSTRACT Following David Theo Goldberg's astute insights, this article discusses a form of neoliberal authoritarianism that extends incessant denial of systematic racial degradation by de(‐)meaning anti‐racism. It argues that de(‐)meaning works to redefine anti‐racist struggle—including demands for a free Palestine and scholarship explaining the politics of racism—as racist and hostile, while recasting racialised and militarised state power as anti‐racist and humane. Thus, anti‐racism is de‐meaned of its ethical and emancipatory terms, re‐meaned as an unethical and exclusionary endeavour threatening modern socio‐political arrangements, demeaned in the traditional, non‐hyphenated sense of the word, and subject to state warfare masquerading as ‘anti‐racism’. As a specific strategy for maintaining structural racism, de(‐)meaning necessitates resistance rather than defensiveness by reclaiming and renewing anti‐racism that is at once political, collective, anti‐militaristic and transformative.
This study examines high-achieving students in Norwegian lower secondary schools who follow accelerated learning trajectories in mathematics, so-called fast-tracks. It asks whether and how fast-tracks improve high-achieving students' learning and performance. The analyses rely on high-quality administrative register data from Norway covering all students who graduated from 2010 to 2017. The results show that fast-track students outperform regular students in mathematics. They are overrepresented with top school grades, so effects are often underestimated using standard methods. To address ceiling effects in grades, we apply Tobit regression and a novel use of correlated-random effects (Mundlak model), embedding fixed-effects and instrumental-variable approaches within nonlinear Tobit models. The results suggest that (1) the fast-tracks improve the students' learning, and (2) the students are selected and self-selected, based on prior performance and background characteristics. When comparing teacher-set grades versus exam grades set by anonymous, randomly assigned examiners, the results suggest that (3) teachers give fast-track students even better grades than regular students. One plausible explanation is that teachers perceive or label fast-track students as more talented than other students. The findings, in particular, suggest that Norwegian teachers compensate disadvantaged fast-track students who originate from homes with limited parental educational resources.
In this address, I discuss the theoretical work I have developed since the publication of my article "Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation" in 1997. First, I discuss the idea of "racial habituation." As part of this discussion, I highlight the centrality of "white normativity" to understand racial affairs. Second, I examine the formation of racial subjects and underscore the import of "regular white folks" (RWF henceforth) in the maintenance of white supremacy regimes. Third, I explore several sources for change. I end my address with an appraisal of the relevance of my claims and mention a few elements that still need to be theorized.
This article explores how self-descriptions can orient organisations towards trajectories that sustain activities that contribute to environmental crises while simultaneously acknowledging both the crises themselves and the need for transformative responses. Existing research on organisational responses has shown how environmental crises are framed, mediated and interpreted in ways that confine responses within a business-as-usual approach. This study develops and demonstrates an alternative, sociological approach for analysing organisational responses that focuses on how the constitution of an organisational 'self' shapes the organisation's interpretation of and involvement in environmental crises. This approach provides more foundational insights into how the conditions are enacted in which organisational responses can emerge and be recognised as such. Empirically, the paper focuses on the main agricultural industry association in Denmark, examining how it describes the conventional Danish agro-industry in relation to environmental crises. The analysis identifies three key elements in the self-description and explores how they shape the organisational response. The findings show that this self-description positions the agro-industry as a solution rather than a driver of environmental crises, thereby legitimising the continuation of existing production practices as a form of response.
Are members of the public still committed to democracy? Existing studies often ask whether members of the public sanction political actors who break institutional or procedural norms. In contrast, we study a shared cultural horizon, which grounds democracy as a way of living. Drawing on Civil Sphere Theory and the sociology of culture and cognition, we conceptualise the horizon as a binary discourse, which can be internalised as a cultural schema by individuals. Through a concept association task administered to a representative sample of the US public, we uncover a widely internalised democratic schema, which is shared across partisan divides and predicts evaluations of political actors. We temper fears of democratic decline, at least at the level of a shared cultural horizon in the United States, provide an individual-level perspective on Civil Sphere Theory, and bridge two sometimes conflicting traditions in cultural sociology.
