In this article, I aim to demystify the hegemonic conception of US nationalism in two ways. First, the literature on nationalism has chiefly focused on non-Western nationalisms depicted as pathological and delayed versions of Western nationalisms and as projects cast away and abandoned by the progressive multicultural West. In this literature, US nationalism is figured as the default and unproblematic type, and hence, exempt from examination. By interrogating this assumption, I take the first step toward demystifying US nationalism. Second, after establishing the need to study US nationalism, I analyze and question civic-ethnic binary and associations with US nationalism. While Western nationalisms in general, and French and US nationalisms in particular, are claimed to be progressively civic, ample evidence testifies to the opposite. I reveal some of the inherent contradictions of such claims to explain how US nationalism, like any other, is defined upon and sustained through exclusionary discourses and violent practices. In conversation with other scholars who question the utility of civic-ethnic binary, I argue for its retention as an analytical lens that can disclose the mechanisms and dynamics by which US nationalism has masked its violence.
This article explores how intimacy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, is negotiated through local speech forms such as taptomi (‘stays with me’), ansa belleh (‘answering the belly’), marraide de pikin (‘marrying the child’) and close friend . These terms constitute what I call half-houses : provisional arrangements that mimic fully acknowledged unions but remain socially or legally incomplete. Building on concepts of retro-legitimation , drawback discourse and quantum words , the article shows how linguistic acts both confer and withhold recognition, stabilizing male honour while exposing women to stigma. The study combines ethnographic narratives, experiential review and discourse analysis to map these practices as cultural infrastructures of intimacy. In so doing, it highlights their role as stress tests of legitimacy, revealing how patriarchal authority, economic precarity and customary norms converge to rehabilitate men while disciplining women. The analysis contributes to African urban, feminist and sociolinguistic scholarship.
This article proposes Al-Hamdania (lemonism) as a name for a Moroccan regime of humor in which the joke no longer arrives as gift, but as obligation, and in which laughter is compelled, suspended, or withdrawn. Lemonism tracks a passage from taste to power. First, it reads failed humor and unlaughter as a public verdict on the collapse of quality, a sensory critique that registers in the sour face and the refusal to play along. Second, it takes the vernacular qadiya ḥamda (the situation is perilous) as a temporal intimidation, a warning that the present has begun to blackmail what is to come, such that futurity is felt less as promise than as risk. Third, it treats humor as a governed field, where platforms, campaigns, and moral repertoires police the boundary between the merely ridiculous and the punishable, sorting jokes into visibility, shame, and sanction. Working through cartoons and popular performance as diagnostic scenes, the article argues that sour humor is not a marginal mood but a political sensorium, a way a social order manages contradiction while continuing to demand laughter at the very point where belief, legitimacy, and the future fray.
Along with the autocratization of the Orbán regime since the mid-2010s, sociology in Hungary has once again come under pressure, echoing earlier conflicts before the democratic transition of 1989–1990. At the same time, global trends affecting academia, such as competitiveness, marketization, and the commercial practices of academic publishing, have been intensified and strategically instrumentalized by the regime. This paper examines how the marketization of academia intertwined with the consolidation of an autocratizing political order in Hungary. Using a process tracing approach, it analyzes how discursive attacks on the social sciences and institutional restructuring jointly constrained academic freedom. The paper also explores how researchers and their professional communities responded to the dual pressures of neoliberal tendencies and an autocratizing regime. In seeking political and economic autonomy, sociologists often turn to the opportunities offered by marketization and internationalization. Yet these same processes may weaken collective resistance to the neoliberal transformation of academia. The Hungarian case demonstrates that in autocratizing regimes academic freedom may be threatened not only through direct political intervention but also through state-supported marketization.
Research on professionalism is dominated by generic models from the Global North. Prevailing frameworks assume well-established institutions, clear professional boundaries and resource-rich service settings. Yet, in postcolonial small islands in the Global South, such premises are difficult to sustain. Police officers, social workers and teachers operate in tightly interwoven communities, with limited workforces and a lack of (financial) means, while balancing local needs with expectations from the former ‘mainland’. This challenge is exacerbated in contemporary contexts, as professionals face pressing issues amid shifts, surprises and sentiments, in short, societal turbulence. In this paper, we explore how professionalism is ‘done’ in turbulent small island service systems. We focus on the Caribbean islands Bonaire and Aruba, both former Dutch colonies, still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Drawing on interviews with 65 professionals across sectors and domains, conducted during a four-month field stay and supplemented by additional visits, we show that professionalism relies on (1) lived expertise, (2) reputational authority and (3) pragmatic autonomy. We conceptualise these dynamics as configurations of ‘grounded professionalism’. Although such grounded professionalism becomes particularly visible in small island contexts, these dimensions reflect broader processes of social and societal embedding of professional acts, also in the Global North.
