The climate crisis not only transforms ecosystems but also reshapes collective imaginaries of the future. While climate fiction (cli-fi) has emerged as a crucial site where societies process the unprecedented challenge of climate change, sociological approaches to emerging literary future imagination remain underdeveloped. Integrating Alexander's theory of iconicity with Mandich’s regimes of engagement with the future, this article conceptualizes cli-fi as a cultural form in which social and aesthetic dimensions converge, and where iconic condensations of meanings and affects are produced by various literary devices. We propose the concept of temporal regimes of iconic engagement to analyze how such aesthetic devices—e.g., narrative structures, stylistic choices, and temporal framings—produce several orientations toward climate uncertainty which are salient at the level of form and feeling. Empirically, we examine a corpus of 50 cli-fi novels published on the Italian market between 1990 and 2024, treating Italy as a strategic site that condenses a wide range of narrative strategies—from techno-scientific thrillers to solarpunk imaginaries. The results identify five macro-typologies of climate fiction books, where each deploys distinctive iconic devices to stage specific temporal regimes of engagement. We argue that climate fiction operates as a performative cultural form whose aesthetic devices are structured so as to stage imaginaries of possibility, responsibility, and hope. In doing so, our study advances general sociological theory by extending cultural sociology to the analysis of how symbolic forms iconically stage collective orientations toward uncertain futures.
Why do communities sharing the same heritage remember the same violent past in profoundly different ways? This article examines that question through divergent collective memories of Chad’s 1917 Cut-Cut Massacre, in which French colonial troops executed over 100 Islamic scholars in eastern Chad. Drawing on colonial archives, museum analysis, commemorative event observations, and media data, I compare remembrance in the Chadian homeland with that of the Chadian diaspora in Canada. I argue that divergence is jointly produced by geopolitical asymmetry and cultural meaning-making: Chad’s dependency on France incentivizes commemorative restraint, while Canada’s multicultural civil sphere enables colonial accountability claims. To analyze how culture and power shape these repertoires, I develop three concepts: religious sacred reframing, through which theological meaning displaces perpetrator accountability; strategic silencing, operating through coercive suppression, anticipatory compliance, and cultural internalization; and transnational competitive memory, through which homeland and diaspora contest interpretive authority. This paper finds that both communities sacralize the massacre through competing symbolic orders; the homeland through religious modalities that converge on silencing perpetrator accountability, the diaspora through a civil sacred human rights register that names the perpetrator the homeland’s theology displaces. Additionally, religious sacred reframing binds the mechanisms of strategic silencing together, making the boundary between sincere belief and strategic restraint difficult to locate from the outside.
This article brings cultural sociology, civil sphere theory, and critical theory into dialogue to examine the empirical-cum-political stakes of education in multicultural societies. Using a mixed-methods approach, it analyzes school cultures in Finland, Scotland, and Sweden, focusing on how the symbolic and interactional life of schools extends beyond academic performance. Schools are understood as moral environments where ideals of solidarity and coexistence, and thus processes of inclusion, are both cultivated and contested, revealing the potential and fragility of a lived civil sphere. The article introduces the concept of critical pedagogy of multicultural incorporation (CPMI), which includes interactional rituals of recognition, awareness of structural barriers, decolonizing practices, and meaningful representation. Magnolia School in Sweden serves as a key case, showing how a “thick” school culture grounded in CPMI supports prosocial outcomes for students with immigrant backgrounds in a society where non-whiteness, non-Western origins, and Muslim identity are increasingly stigmatized. In contrast, other schools in the study demonstrate thinner or more rhetorical approaches to diversity. The results show how young people across Europe encounter school cultures that vary in relation to their mode of incorporation, and are thus equipped with different tools for learning about collective life and how to imagine solidarity.
While the British monarchy is hardly a central case for social scientists, it has attracted enough attention to constitute a significant niche. However, the existing accounts of the monarchy miss its central feature: powerlessness. This article argues that powerlessness is not mere weakness but rather a substantial and productive force in political culture. The article proceeds by examining the cultural construction of the contemporary British monarchy’s powerlessness at three sites: the institutional monarchy, the performed monarchy, and the popular monarchy. Powerlessness operates uniquely at each of these sites. This article argues that the construction of powerlessness at the institutional and performative levels produces a tension in political culture. The article concludes by arguing that a distinct, symbolic powerlessness generated in popular culture offers one ambiguous settlement to the cultural contradictions of monarchal powerlessness.
This article introduces the concept “imagined work-family futures” to examine how young adults’ narratives about their futures shape gender inequalities later in their careers. Drawing on 127 longitudinal interviews with 69 prospective law school students, we show that, at career launch, men and women have equally ambitious aspirations to have high-status careers and to raise children. Yet their expectations—or, their narrated work-family plans and interpretations of probable career scenarios—diverge prior to law school entrance. Respondents articulated one of two expectations about future work-family conflict. Laissez-faire narratives, more common among men, articulate one’s career aspirations as central to one’s current self and work-family conflict as a problem for one’s future self. Deliberate narratives, more common among women, articulate one’s career as inevitably structured by one’s future family and as a problem for one’s current self. Analysis of longitudinal interviews during and after law school reveals that respondents’ expectations remained largely consistent throughout professional socialization, shaping some job choices among women. We discuss how, alongside structural constraints, imagined work-family futures set the stage for future patterns of gender inequality.
The article extends framing research by integrating the concepts of thick and thin culture with binary codes to propose Myanmar’s dual-core cultural continuum, grounded in Amyotha Yae (the Myanmar nationalistic complex) and democracy. Through three cases—Shwe Kokko (March 2019 to August 2022), No More Bets (August–September 2023), and the 1027 Operation (October 2023–January 2024)—the analysis traces how Burmese media framed the antagonists in the “Northern Myanmar online scam,” shifting from Chinese harming Burmese to Chinese harming Chinese, and ultimately to Junta harming Chinese. Treating the media as social actors, the study conceptualizes framing as social performance, in which symbolic codes are selectively activated. Findings show that these framing processes were never centrally about online scam itself, but about evolving perceptions of China, Myanmar, China–Myanmar relations, and the country’s political trajectory. Frame shifts corresponded to relational changes in events but, more crucially, to the specific cultural elements mobilized within Burma’s multilayered symbolic structure. The study demonstrates the analytical value of culture thickness in revealing the diverse possibilities of semiotic shifts that shape framing dynamics in multicultural contexts.
This paper explores Israeli Memorial Day ceremonies during the COVID-19 lockdown, conducted online per state orders. These ceremonies constitute a productive cultural site to examine the deep currents that characterize late-modern nationalism, intensified and exposed by the coronavirus crisis. An analysis of 27 ceremonies revealed how the transition online introduced a new ceremonial experience and exposed an ambivalent relation toward the nation-state. We argue that these changes indicate a model of national belonging we call ‘individualized nationalism,’ which combines a deep commitment to the nation-state, on the one hand, and strong individualization processes, on the other. The mnemonic community at the basis of individualized nationalism is composed of distinct individuals whose solidarity with the state relies less on ecstatic experiences of togetherness and more on interpersonal distance, reflexivity, and online consumption of national sentiments.
How do different types of culture spread around the world? Do norms travel much like technologies? Do media and commodities diffuse in different ways? Surprisingly, research on cultural diffusion cannot yet answer these questions. Most scholars examine the spread of only one cultural object or class of object at a time. While this can tell us much about the actors, networks, and institutions involved, it tells us little about the objects themselves. In this article, we employ a comparative approach to show how cultural objects vary, specifically how they meet different kinds of resistance in the new environments they enter. This resistance, we argue, generates different kinds of “cultural friction” which shape the strategies actors use to successfully adopt and adapt a cultural object. We propose a theoretical model based on two types of friction—normative and relational—and their relationship to four adaptation strategies—value construction, alliance building, customization, and resource exchange. We demonstrate the plausibility of our model with four empirical cases: child labor norms, the Project ECHO telementoring model, Sesame Street programs, and Sesame Street branded toys.
The gender equality agenda promoted by the feminist movement in Chile has, as in other countries, faced multifaceted legal, political, and cultural resistance. This article analyzes the reactions of public media intellectuals to the feminist revolt that the country experienced between April and June 2018. In particular, it studies the opinion columns published in the country’s leading newspapers. We characterize opinion columns as devices to regulate the opinion space and the public sphere. We examine the types of subjects addressed in these columns and the roles the columnists ascribe to men and women in the public space. We argue that media intellectuals promote the presence of certain subjects (Butler in Cuerpos Aliados y Lucha Política, Editorial Paidós, Barcelona, 2015) through the use of emotional signs (Ahmed in La política cultural de las emociones Universidad Autónoma de México, 2015) and render other subjects and subjectivities invisible. Male intellectuals tend to defend traditional gender roles and denounce the presence of women in public spaces. Furthermore, they question feminist demands as irrational, while intellectually appropriating certain slogans of the feminist movement. In contrast, female columnists tend to denounce the gender injustices they suffer on a daily basis. The research shows that male media intellectuals tend to perform social closure that ensures their right to appear and speak in the public sphere.
With a steady onslaught of extreme weather events and quickly surpassed temperature records, the climate crisis is increasingly moving from the realm of hypotheticals to that of lived experience. In this context, many sociologists have called for their discipline to make climate change a core agenda item. While climate change-focused sociology has certainly increased of late, a general dissatisfaction with the discipline’s treatment of the issue remains. Two obstacles to developing of a fully fledged “sociology of climate change” are tensions of temporality and scale; its global scope and a tendency to discuss it in terms of possible futures make it difficult to frame climate change in terms of the present-day and localized phenomena many sociologists study. I propose Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” as a cultural framework for studying climate change as it is actively experienced in the present. Williams used structures of feeling to describe the distinctive quality of experience that characterizes a period, and to challenge us to consider how the personal, affective realm of “feeling” is implicated in social processes that transcend us. Using computational methods and qualitative analysis and following Williams’ assertion that structures of feeling are most visible in creative work, I analyze short stories in the literary subgenre of “climate fiction.” I find a temporal shift in these works, where they transition between imagining the acute destruction of climate chaos and the possibilities of post-apocalypse. I take these shifts to indicate underlying patterns in the affective social experience of climate change.
This article offers three methodological and analytical insights to enhance scholars’ analyses of how everyday social actors make meaning of race, racism, and the process of racialization. These insights highlight the value in: (1) operationalizing concepts related to race, racism, and racialization in interview questions (2) applying visual research methods such as photo–elicitation interviews, especially those that incorporate images of celebratory and other ritualistic cultural events, and (3) employing visual resonance as an analytic device to delineate the schemata interpreters mobilize to evaluate the legitimacy of racialized imagery. The paper draws on qualitative research conducted in Santiago, Chile and Cartagena, Colombia. The strategies discussed in both cases are beneficial for unpacking how people make meaning of race, racism, and the process of racialization in places where cultural narratives suggest that society is not mired by systems of racial oppression and where people claim to be less wedded to white–black dyadic notions of racial identity, such as Latin America.
Race is conceptualized and articulated differently at various times and in various places. How then can sociologists of race draw meaningful comparisons across diverse cultural settings (or time periods)? This article proposes two strategies for cross-national scholarship on race. First, we must understand that race is just one member of a broader family of classifications grounded in shared or co-descent—and that it has different connotations in the U.S. than it does elsewhere. Paradoxically, then, researchers must let go of rigid preconceptions of what constitutes race, and cast a wide net to explore a range of adjacent notions of difference that they and their subjects may or may not label as “race.” This leads to the second strategy: the decomposition of any given concept of co-descent into key components in order to describe and compare it more precisely. Based on over 150 interviews conducted in the United States and in Italy, I identify seven meaningful dimensions of descent-based concepts of difference. This framework aims to contribute to a global cultural sociology of co-descent that can bridge myriad worlds of meaning-making and boundary-drawing, including those suffused with a notion of race.
Not even ten years after its adoption in the Paris Agreement in 2015, the 1.5 °C target has already been rendered moot as average global temperatures (at least temporarily) soared past the limit in 2024. In 2025, however, the target continues to be contested in its effects and its sustained use is debated: Has the 1.5 °C target led to false hopes? Or does it continue to effectively mark the shortfalls of the present? This qualitative discourse analysis conceptualizes the 1.5 °C target as a numerical myth that emerged after Paris to unpack the dual meanings the number carries. From 2015 through 2019, years marked by insufficient political action on the climate, the target shifted in its meanings from unrealistic, merely strategic concession to a possible, sensible, and imperative orientation for future climate action. In international newspapers, representations of the target became increasingly authoritative and yet unclear in their implications, emptying 1.5 °C of its original intentions to promote climate justice and invoking new meanings of continued human control over the climate. This case shows how numbers elude hopes of developing a clearcut understanding of climate change, enabling continued contradictions to go unnoticed.
Arguing with culture—that is, making claims with and about culture—seems to require one to assert something about what culture does. But I propose that such a requirement unduly limits sociologists to an invariant, positivist form of argument. By examining claims making with and about culture in terms of mereology, or part-whole relations, I distinguish two modes of arguing with culture: fragmentary and constitutive. The former revolves around claims wherein parts are potentially autonomous bearers of distinct forces; the latter revolves around claims wherein parts mediate one another, and their relations evince distinct forms. Moreover, these two modes of argument entail different ways of appealing to wholes. Fragmentary arguments treat wholes as analytically insignificant residuals. Constitutive arguments treat wholes as analytically crucial. Thus, attention to how people argue with culture opens the space for careful reflection on and debate about explanatory practices.
This paper challenges sociology’s reductive approach to failure talk in the interview, which flattens its complexity and denies social actors’ interpretive powers. While cultural sociology typically foregrounds meaning making activity, it undercuts this commitment when participants speak of failure. We show how this inconsistency is sustained by an analytical bias that treats failure talk as evidence of internalized individualism and by three methodological tendencies that emerge in interview practice: avoiding failure talk to protect rapport; focusing on its role in narratives of self-betterment; and responding to it as a disempowering form of speech. We offer an alternative framework that treats talk of failure as meaning making and critique. We reclaim three tools of cultural sociology—cultural autonomy, ordinary critique, and boundary work—and provide practical methodological tips for engaging failure talk more expansively. Drawing on interviews with young people at a cosmopolitan high school in Northern Europe and older adults reflecting on democratic transitions in Greece, we demonstrate how failure talk can evoke sharp, emotionally complex critiques of institutional norms and cultural ideals. By realigning cultural sociology’s theoretical commitments with its empirical practices, we reposition failure talk not as critique’s opposite, but as one of its most ordinary, ambivalent, and revealing forms.
This article aims to conceptualize movement texts as a crucial yet often overlooked phenomenon in the articulation of collective identity and narratives in the context of social movements. We define movement texts as symbolic acts that publicly manifest a social movement as a collective actor. Against the backdrop of the “narrative turn” in social movement studies and adjacent fields, we argue that the concept of movement text can be understood as the “missing link” in the analysis of narratives and their social contexts. We conceptualize the movement text through three interrelated dimensions: as a material artifact, a social practice, and a discursive genre. We then suggest a methodological framework for the analysis of how movement texts produce meaning, focusing on how ambivalences in the texts can be analyzed as reconciliations or negotiations of both internal tension and systemic contradiction defining the social context in which the movement acts. The contribution of this article is simultaneously theoretical, historical, and methodological, as it shifts from a one-sided focus on the “immaterial” dimensions of narratives and storytelling to an emphasis on the socio-materiality of movement texts within collective action and social change.
Iconic figures are social and cultural constructions that are usually believed to represent the sacred and/or the extraordinary, but scholars have paid less attention to "ordinary icons," those figures whose iconicity revolves around their ordinariness. Dr. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who warned about the COVID-19 virus and later died from the virus, was a typical "ordinary icon." Drawing on theories of icon and iconicity, event as drama, and authoritarian politics, and an in-depth study of numerous texts collected from traditional and social media, this article aims to identify the primary features of "ordinary icons" and explain their iconization. An "ordinary icon" is perceived, labeled, and interpreted by the public as an "ordinary person" to express various social and political meanings. Its iconization can be explained by the deep cultural structure, event, and political structure. In this case, Dr. Li became an "ordinary icon" because of: (1) the cultural structure in China and its recent changes, particularly individualization, which separates individuals' private life from the state and emphasizes individuals' rights, dignity, and values; (2) dramatic moments, critical junctures, and corresponding public interpretations during China's COVID crisis; 3) China's authoritarian political structure, which shapes the specific articulations of the cultural codes and the event flow. All the factors worked together at different moments of the pandemic and made Dr. Li a multivocal icon of ordinariness.
In this paper, we examine the symbolic boundaries used by libertarian scholars and organization leaders to distinguish themselves from conservatives, progressives, and other libertarians. We show that during semi–structured interviews, respondents highlighted different types of moral borders to portray their social identities as congruent with the intellectual life of the academy. Our analysis is significant for cultural sociologists because libertarians defy easy political categorization, meaning adherents must continually negotiate other people’s stereotypes and misinformation about what libertarians actually believe. Further, among graduate students and professors, there is an additional concern that failing to conform to the progressive norms of higher education can derail their academic careers. Thus, we argue that libertarians offer a unique opportunity for studying the interconnections between symbolic boundaries and institutional contexts in the performances of social identity.
Since the emergence of Trumpism, a host of civil society actors have converged in defense of democracy, championing rank choice voting (RCV) as a necessary electoral reform. RCV is shown to lessen partisan animosity and increase voter representation, though researchers have struggled to account for its impact on political culture. This paper asks if RCV enhances civility in governance through study of Alaska, the second state to implement RCV reforms. Drawing on original interviews with elected officials during the first post-RCV Alaskan legislative session, the study finds RCV expanded a vital center in governance but also sparked a backlash movement to repeal the reforms. Framing the reforms and the repeal movement as occurring within frontlash/backlash, this paper offers a dynamic account of the fraught and contentious nature of electoral reform. The analysis demonstrates that despite efforts to transcend hyperpartisanship, Alaskan RCV has been dogged by partisan framing in turn drawing new scrutiny to the electoral system. The findings of this study point to broader risks-the polarization of democratic institutions and the ascendance of constitutional politics. The fragile yet pivotal role of the vital center as a source of social solidarity and deference to shared democratic norms is advanced.
