This article draws on empirical material from Hungary to develop conceptual contributions to understanding the transformation of the racial order in Europe. The alignment of the racialization of east-central European societies with longue durée patterns of inequality has produced several interlocking paradoxes. Focusing on the reception of Porgy and Bess in Hungary, we compare debates surrounding the opera’s 1970 socialist-era staging, which relied on blackface as a theatrical device for marking Blackness, and the controversies generated by the 2018 production at the Hungarian State Opera House, which also ignored the Gershwin estate’s all-Black-cast stipulation without using blackface. The resulting international controversy revealed patterns of Whiteness claims unfolding through invocations of Blackness as evidence for semi-peripheral strategies of moral geopolitics, while also situating these debates within longer historical transformations of race relations. Using press materials, institutional statements, and public debates, we trace how competing techniques of representation become embedded within broader struggles of identity politics and racialized judgments of taste. The article demonstrates how cultural conflicts over opera and “high culture” can illuminate transformations in the racialization of east-central Europe within global cultural hierarchies.
This study aims to advance our understanding of criticism of scientific institutions by those who are scientifically oriented. To this end, we focus on a strategic case: criticism of climate science among people who use a scientific repertoire. An abductive analysis of 20 in-depth interviews highlights the existence of a ‘science confidence gap’, that is, self-ascribed affinity with modern scientific methods and principles, but distrust of climate science institutions. Our investigation illustrates how respondents equate a good scientific attitude with an individualist epistemology. Engaging in a form of boundary work, they argue that climate science institutions stifle such an individualist epistemology. More specifically, respondents identify five mechanisms that inhibit the scientific rigour of climate science: (1) ‘consensus-thinking’; (2) institutional path-dependency; (3) political agenda-setting; (4) the negativity bias inherent in the scientific endeavour; and (5) the ‘unscientificness’ of climate models. This study demonstrates empirically what a scientific critique of scientific institutions entails and how it can be understood. Our findings may inspire future research on criticism of scientific institutions in other fields.
This article discusses major culture controversies occurring in Norway over the last decades as instances of boundary blurring between the aesthetic and non-aesthetic spheres, focusing on aesthetic sphere actors’ struggles for autonomy. Drawing on influential sociological theories, it examines how the spheres of state, market, civil, intimate relations, and religion are perceived as threatening aesthetic sphere autonomy, both by aesthetic sphere and non-aesthetic sphere actors. The analysis identifies key figures who are able to transform aesthetic sphere discussions, practices, and decisions into public sphere controversies, and it explores the repair activities used to restore legitimate relations between social spheres. Finally, it assesses whether the aesthetic sphere’s legitimate relations with other spheres are characterized as autonomous or semi-autonomous, and how current relations are evaluated by actors both inside and outside the sphere of aesthetics. The article demonstrates that contemporary struggles for aesthetic sphere autonomy are complex and involve numerous actors, and that the legitimacy of inter-sphere relations is context dependent.
This symposium engages with Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book Frontlash/Backlash (published in 2025) a significant contribution to civil sphere theory that places contestation over belonging at the centre of democratic life. The symposium opens with an introduction by Eric Taylor Woods, followed by critical commentaries from Matthias Revers, Lone Sorensen, and Maria Rovisco. Together, these contributions examine conceptual, empirical, and normative implications of Alexander’s argument. They raise questions about the place of regulative and communicative institutions in civil spheres, the impact of digital media in amplifying polarization, and the normative foundations of the distinction between ‘frontlash’ and ‘backlash’ movements. In response, Alexander offers a robust defence of his framework, clarifying its underlying assumptions and contesting key critiques. Ultimately, the symposium offers a sustained dialogue on the extent to which democratic societies can endure deepening polarization and escalating contestation.
This article examines how urbanites debate their city’s transformations through the symbolic medium of iconic architecture. In the Belgian city of Antwerp stands the so-called Farmers’ Tower, a 1931 Art Deco icon, long celebrated by architecture enthusiasts and local inhabitants. An episode of public controversy emerged, however, when industrialist and art patron Fernand Huts privately purchased the tower and circulated visual representations of its exterior redesign – the latter commissioned from architect Daniel Libeskind and, under mounting public pressure, ultimately withdrawn. Building on the Strong Program in cultural sociology, this controversy is reconstructed as a ‘social drama’ consisting of a breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration. Across a five-year period (2020–2025), the Farmers’ Tower constituted a symbolic surface through which the drama’s protagonists and antagonists – Huts and Libeskind on the one hand, and an amalgam of architecture critics on the other – developed competing understandings of the city’s community bonds, temporal trajectory, and changing role on the world stage. The article thus reveals how architectural icons become objects of conflictual meaning-making among social actors endowed with unequal levels of performative power.
