This article examines how global decolonial agendas are appropriated and negotiated in the Czech Republic, a post-socialist semi-peripheral context where such debates lack sustained institutional anchoring. Drawing on 25 in-depth interviews with activists, artists, academics, and journalists, we analyze how decolonial discourse is localized through two interrelated processes: affective encounters and modes of engagement. First, we identify how universities, artistic fields, journalist platforms and digital environments function as sites where individuals first encounter decolonial thought, generating affective responses that catalyze engagement. Second, we develop a typology of engagement structured along two axes—orientation (advocacy–skepticism) and modality (deliberative–reactive)—capturing how actors navigate and reinterpret decolonial discourse in public and digital arenas. We argue that in the Czech context, decoloniality emerges through friction with locally dominant cultural repertoires, including narratives of colonial innocence and national victimhood. By integrating affect theory, cultural sociology, and media and cultural studies, the article contributes to broader debates on how global social movements are reconfigured in semi-peripheral settings, demonstrating that localization is an affective process shaped by historically specific institutional and cultural conditions.
This article explores how the Chinese people make sense of the often-traumatic struggle to create modern China. In a society cautious about explicit political comments, art provides a chance to reflect on sensitive collective experiences. Films by Fifth-Generation filmmakers, for example, arouse emotional responses and reconstruct historical memory. Amidst the search for a new post-Mao national narrative, these films created shared spaces where audiences can revisit the past, contest official narratives, and negotiate meanings of history. We focused on two landmark Fifth-Generation films— Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine and Zhang Yimou’s To Live — to examine how viewers engaged with contested narratives. Drawing on thousands of reviews on Douban.com, China’s leading platform featuring discussions of art, we analyzed how educated, middle-class Chinese interpret the nation’s recent past. Combining semi-supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with close readings of representative reviews, we mapped a wide-ranging national discussion. Comparing maps derived from both films, we identified distinct schools of thought and their interrelations. Reviewers often portrayed some suffering as deeply tragic, while casting other misfortune as emblematic of collective endurance. Through these reflections, reviewers voiced perspectives beyond official discourse and engaged in collective meaning-making, joining a broader conversation about modern China’s evolving national narrative. This project contributes to cultural sociology by showing how popular reflections on art can shape shared and divergent understandings of history. It introduces innovative ways to study the role that culture and conversation about culture play in the dynamic debate of a society’s core values and beliefs.
Human movement patterns have been profoundly altered by the rising frequency and severity of disasters, especially the acceleration of migration to urban regions. Both sudden-onset and slow-onset disasters threaten livelihoods, homes, and essential services, forcing impacted communities to seek safety and opportunities in urban areas. Urban areas provide access to services and a variety of livelihoods, but unplanned and quick relocation frequently creates new vulnerabilities, particularly for migrants residing in informal settlements. This study analyzes the main obstacles and new opportunities in the relationship between urban migration and catastrophe resilience. The study examines how urban systems react to migrant influxes, how disasters work as migration drivers, and how resilience-oriented governance might turn migration into an adaptive strategy. It is based on a qualitative examination of secondary literature. The paper contends that merging disaster risk management, climate adaptation, and inclusive urban development is crucial for creating resilient cities and protecting migrant communities.
This article examines the political function of humor through the career of Abbie Hoffman, focusing on his signature tactics of playful disrespect. Hoffman’s pranks—levitating the Pentagon, showering dollar bills on the New York Stock Exchange, nominating a pig for president, and publishing Steal This Book—undermined authority not through confrontation but through refusal to take power seriously. Such practices drew even reluctant audiences into what may be called “involuntary politics,” pulling bystanders into performances they did not choose. Situating Hoffman within a transatlantic genealogy, the article traces connections to medieval Ship of Fools allegories, commedia dell’arte, Bakhtin’s concept of carnival laughter, and twentieth-century European avant-gardes, including the Situationists, the Dutch Provo movement, Berlin’s Kommune 1, and the absurdist humor of Prague. In each case, humor acts as a political weapon by degrading authority, creating moral dilemmas, and transforming solemn spaces into carnival stages. The article argues that Hoffman’s tactics exemplify a specifically modern synthesis: the perfection of European humor traditions for a media-saturated age, where counter-spectacle interrupts official spectacle. Engaging scholarship on ironic activism, authoritarian co-optation, and the inverted carnival, the article argues that the politics of playful disrespect remain not only historically illuminating but politically urgent—and that its limits are as instructive as its achievements.
This paper, first, investigates how the social contract of post-2011 Revolution Tunisia was shaped using a process tracing methodology and, second, investigates the comparative gains/losses of the different considered social actors from this social contract. The social contract is perceived as a product of the prevailing state-society relations which are analyzed based on social and policy coalitions. The actors’ activities and their comparative gains/losses from the resulting social contract are investigated in terms of two broad policy subsystems: competition and welfare. Depending on qualitative data collected from a number of semi-structured interviews and the literature, this research suggests that the post-2011 social contract leaned towards state capture. It was shaped by the democratization process that interacted with several contextual conditions such as political polarization, prevalence of networks of favoritism, strong labor union movement that represented mainly public sector labor, and weaker and fragmentated interest representation of entrepreneurs. The resultant social contract was one where tycoons mainly benefited from lax implementation of laws and regulations without yielding more economic prosperity. Entrepreneurs’ benefits from democratic empowerment of broad-based business associations were overshadowed by high favoritism and fragmentation of business representation. The welfare benefits brought by the strengthened labor organizational representation were largely confined to public sector labor, while private sector labor conditions comparatively deteriorated. Entrepreneurs and private sector labor’s losses were greater in this contract than in the former Ben Ali’s crony capitalist contract, making it even less sustainable than its predecessor.
Although scholarly and political debates on the causes of democratic backsliding have expanded rapidly over the last decade, they often remain fragmented and superficial, emphasizing symptoms (e.g. the rise of autocratic leaders, polarization) rather than addressing the underlying structural drivers, rendering the discovery of effective countermeasures exceedingly difficult. This paper argues from a structuralist perspective that the emergence of the phenomenon can be traced back to oligarchical interference into the political sphere as the root cause and metaphorical disease. This occurs both in the form of direct interventions by means such as lobbying, campaign financing, etc. and through indirect mechanisms eroding the democratic discourse and state power itself, especially by Big-Tech-companies yielding the power of advancing media and general information processing technology and (asset-management) companies absorbing former state functions. The paper concludes with a call to focus creative and financial resources on these root problems instead of the symptoms.
The rapid dissemination of fake news on social media poses unprecedented challenges to consumer trust and the legitimacy of businesses. This research investigates how exposure to fake news, moderated by religious and political orientations, exacerbates confirmation bias and reduces social media engagement, with subsequent effects on consumer perceptions of businesses. Across three experimental studies (N = 1,052), we integrate construal level theory, moral foundations theory, and elaboration likelihood model to propose and test a novel framework. Findings reveal that fake news triggers distinct cognitive and moral pathways - dependent on ideological strength - leading to heightened confirmation bias and reduced engagement (e.g., sharing, liking). Advanced analytics, including moderated mediation and latent profile analysis, underscore the heterogeneity of these effects. This study pioneers a multidimensional understanding of fake news in consumer behavior, offering actionable insights for marketers and policymakers to counter misinformation in ideologically polarized contexts.
Prominent accounts of the far-right upsurge rest on the notion of backlash. However, I argue that backlash explanations for the rise of anti-feminist and far-right mobilization, which center on defensive reactions concentrated among older, white, materially precarious strata against progressivism, are inadequate to explain the youth-centered gender polarization and the emergence of the manosphere, a loose digital ecosystem centered around radicalized views of masculinity, men’s rights, and misogyny. I advance an alternative theoretical explanation that centers on sacralization, a social process by which collectives deem certain values as sacred. The theory explains masculinity politics through the power of collective sacred symbols and the formation of in-groups and out-groups. Drawing on Hans Joas, it highlights tensions between the universalist and particularist tendencies of sacralization. These tensions lead to the paper’s original typology of universalized particularism, which appropriates universalist narratives for particularist ends, and particularism contra universalism, which pits particularist ideals against universalist moral claims. The utility of the sacralization framework and the typology is illustrated through an analysis of Andrew Tate, a manosphere influencer known for promoting violence against women, by examining his religious messaging and the collective sacralization of his following.
Across Europe, young people report declining electoral participation yet remain active in informal and online political expression. While digital platforms are often portrayed as democratizing political voice, it remains unclear whether they truly mitigate structural inequalities or reconfigure them in new forms. This study examines how gender, family SES, and generational cohort shape youth participation across electoral, informal, and online arenas, asking whether digital platforms operate through different mechanisms than resource-intensive offline channels. Using data from the 2021 Flash Eurobarometer ( n = 17,953; ages 15—30; 27 EU member states), this study examines three hypotheses: (1) gender gaps vary by participation form, with women more active in informal and online engagement; (2) SES effects attenuate online as communicative competencies replace material resources; (3) family political discussion effects persist similarly across Millennials and Gen Z, suggesting continuity rather than rupture in socialization. The findings show that young women report higher levels of participation than young men across all forms, challenging conventional assumptions about gender gaps in political engagement. Socioeconomic resources remain strong predictors of electoral and informal participation but play a weaker and more uneven role online. Generational differences are modest, suggesting continuity rather than rupture in political socialization processes. Overall, digital platforms expand expression opportunities for expression but reconfigures rather than dismantles enduring inequalities in youth political participation.
During the first year of Javier Milei's administration in Argentina, a series of measures reoriented public policy, with a notable impact on cultural policy. The law "Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines," enacted in the administration's early months, enabled a substantial restructuring of public cultural institutions, accompanied by budget cuts and revised criteria for awarding subsidies. In this context, the case of the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) is paradigmatic: debates over its restructuring received extensive media coverage and became a public cause that transcended the audiovisual sector. Using a pragmatic sociological approach focused on argumentation, this study analyzes public statements made by actors involved in the "cultural war" over INCAA. We identify and examine the arguments for and against the government's proposed restructuring of the institute, as well as the actions implied by those arguments. The study of this case shows how the radical right's "cultural war" becomes operationalized through belligerent discourse and concrete political action within the government. Consequently, the audiovisual community's response to the government's cultural policy permits an analysis of the repositioning of artistic critique in relation to the new policy, demonstrating how INCAA became a collective cause around which national imaginaries were mobilized in contemporary Argentina.
In this paper, I study the emerging political depolarization field in the contemporary US through a network analysis of civil society organizations working to overcome political divides. Because polarization can prevent us from not only solving other social problems, but the problem of polarization itself, I look specifically at whether organizations directly focused on bridging—who represent the core of the supposedly non-partisan depolarization field—practice what they preach by embodying non-partisanship and engaging in cross-partisan ties within their own interorganizational environment. Drawing on data compiled from the Princeton Bridging Divides Initiative, Twitter/X, and AllSides media, I analyze organizations’ partisanship and use Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to assess the likelihood for bridging organizations to form ties across political differences within the political depolarization field. I find that while bridging-focused organizations are left of center overall, they are relatively less left-leaning than their nonbridging counterparts. And, while bridging organizations show no difference in forming ties across political differences in general, they are more likely to connect with politically different organizations when those organizations have a nonbridging focus. I argue that this pattern reflects the strength of the non-partisan ideal at the core of the bridging movement, where bridging organizations apply stricter partisan standards to fellow bridging organizations than to nonbridging organizations for whom political difference is expected and unremarkable. I discuss the implications of these findings for the prefigurative commitments of the bridging movement and for tensions between civic and partisan logics within the broader depolarization field.
This paper critically assesses a new trend in political communication: The rise of deepfakes and AI-generated visualizations to promote candidates or parties in political campaigns – and the term “softfakes” coined to describe this phenomenon. We systematize current use cases of generative audio-visual AI for campaigning, namely multilingual outreach, testimonials of support (including by deceased people), likeable depictions and flawless avatars of candidates, AI-mediated two-way communication between politicians and citizens, (hyper-)personalized political advertising, campaigning under (alleged) repression, and illustrating political campaigns. We argue that deeming such uses of deepfakes and less sophisticated generative AI content “soft” is unjustified from a semantic, ethical, and democracy-theoretical perspective since they bear great potential for manipulation and deception. Moreover, they contribute to fragmenting the political debate and raise serious ethical concerns related to human dignity. Besides, we argue that accepting the term “softfake” could contribute to public and political indifference to digital manipulation, thereby obstructing regulation. Since the use of generative AI for audio-visual political campaigning will arguably become the “new normal”, political actors, society, and researchers must consider e.g., adapting regulatory frameworks for political advertising, establishing industrial or political codes of conduct, and enhancing public media literacy and resilience to digital manipulation.
The article analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social reproduction based on the experience of the “Zero Eviction” campaign in Brazil, reflecting on its relevance – in particular on women’s lives – in curbing imminent social setbacks caused by a deepening of the economic crisis that accompanied the public health emergency. Faced with the negligence of the State in regards to the effects of evictions and removals for people in precarious situations during the health emergency, the campaign undertook a national coordination of organizations and social movements in defense of the right to housing and land. The campaign not only succeeded in achieving important institutional measures, but also in halting ongoing legal and administrative actions that threatened to violate these rights. We will argue in this article that the campaign has particular effects on women, primarily responsible for social reproduction in our society. Housing protection is fundamental for enabling day-to-day family support strategies in the context of economic and social precarity.
