This study examines the ways in which anti‐immigrant right‐wing populist discourse is produced in Türkiye within the framework of population politics. The discourses of the Victory Party and the Good Party were analyzed within the framework of Wodak’s (2015a) discourse‐historical approach; a dataset consisting of parliamentary group speeches and press releases covering the periods of the 2023 general elections and the 2024 local elections was used. The research findings reveal that, although both parties perceive immigration as a threat, they diverge significantly in terms of political positioning, populist antagonism, and threat framing. In the context of political positioning, the Victory Party positions itself as a radical “single‐issue party” focused on anti‐immigration politics; the Good Party adopts an institutional and legalistic language. In terms of populist antagonism, the Victory Party deploys both horizontal and vertical antagonism, targeting immigrants, the ruling party, and the mainstream opposition alike, whereas the Good Party focuses primarily on vertical antagonism. In its threat framing, the Victory Party constructs immigration as a militaristic existential crisis, equating it with demographic collapse, cultural invasion, and security threats, whereas the Good Party develops its narrative around security, economic, and labor issues in a more institutional language.
Across Europe, migrants in legal precarity experience forms of carcerality that extend beyond prison walls. This carceral continuum operates through migration controls, policing, bureaucratic scrutiny, stigma, and, increasingly, digital infrastructures. Drawing on two multi‐sited fieldworks and digital ethnographies in Europe, this article explores how two formerly incarcerated migrant men navigate this continuum through digital practices. Bridging migration studies, border criminology, and digital anthropology, we extend Gurusami’s (2019) concept of the carceral web by introducing carceral slippages to capture a form of control that is pervasive without being seamless: Articulations across penal, migration, administrative, and digital systems remain partial, opaque, and difficult to anticipate. These slippages generate uncertainty while leaving limited room for manoeuvre. We then show how migrants negotiate this condition through digital moral labour: selectively disclosing or concealing incarceration, managing stigma, and sustaining obligations of care across geographically dispersed relationships. Rather than treating digital technologies primarily as deterministic instruments of state surveillance or merely emancipation, we explore how they also become infrastructures through which migrants negotiate personhood, care, and obligation under conditions of legal precarity. By foregrounding migrants’ retrospective experiences and (digital) practices, we show how carceral slippages shape both the uncertainty individuals endure and the limited possibilities through which they negotiate who they are and who they can become. This article complicates accounts of carcerality as seamless or totalising, showing how the carceral web can remain pervasive precisely through its fragmented and uncertain articulation.
This article examines social workers’ experiences, perceptions, and understanding of the role of digital advocacy in the rehabilitation and reintegration process of incarcerated people. The current study, located in Lithuania, is based on three focus group discussions with 15 social workers working at local prisons and NGOs. The research reveals that people in prison experience limited access to digital technologies, including the internet, mobile phones, and even TV, due to strict institutional regulations. Social workers reflect on the needs of people in prison for digital literacy, self‐efficacy, and advocacy to counteract stigma and to promote a more nuanced understanding of incarceration. Public prejudices and media stigmatisation reinforce social exclusion, while proactive digital advocacy could contribute to the humanization process and community acceptance of individuals with justice system involvement. Based on the social workers’ voices, this article addresses digital advocacy and digital literacy as a shifting paradigm in prison‐based social work, which requires the balancing of digital provisions and risk management on the individual, professional, and institutional levels.
This introductory piece situates the contributions to the thematic issue “Compassionate Futures for Collective Well‐Being” within contemporary debates on care and compassion. Against the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, self‐sufficient individual, the articles assembled here foreground vulnerability, interdependence, and mutual responsibility as constitutive features of social life and as foundations for imagining alternative futures. Across diverse geographical, institutional, and more‐than‐human contexts, the contributions examine how care and compassion are enacted through everyday practices, welfare institutions, educational initiatives, participatory research, grassroots networks, urban governance, and multispecies relations. Rather than presenting a celebratory account of compassion, the thematic issue highlights its ambivalent and contested character. Several contributions demonstrate how care can sustain life, foster inclusion, and enable collective agency, while others reveal how discourses of compassion may become entangled with surveillance, exclusion, paternalism, and governance. Together, the articles advance a rich conceptual vocabulary for understanding care and compassion as ethical commitments, political projects, institutional rationalities, and material practices through which social worlds are organized and reproduced. This introduction argues that these contributions collectively point toward the emergence of compassionism as a developing intellectual and political orientation. While not yet a fully stabilized paradigm, compassionism offers a relational alternative to dominant models grounded in competition, individualism, and instrumental rationality and invites an ethico‐onto‐epistemological reorientation of scholarship and social action. The thematic issue thus contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink the conditions of collective well‐being and to explore the possibilities—and limits—of compassionate futures in an era marked by multiple social, ecological, and political crises.
This article reexamines the foundations of policing by advancing homo curans—the caring human—not as a normative ideal, but as an emergent institutional rationality and governance disposition. Positioned as a counter‐logic to the long‐dominant homo economicus model of instrumental rationality, the study analyzes how security is increasingly reframed as a mechanism of collective care, structured by interdependence and responsiveness rather than coercion alone. Methodologically, the study combines critical discourse analysis of 300 Chinese media reports on policing (2014–2024) with 28 semi‐structured interviews involving frontline officers, experts, and citizens. This design traces how homo curans functions as both a discursive legitimation frame and an operational logic across institutional texts and frontline practices. Findings reveal a gradual but uneven “care turn” in Chinese policing narratives. While early coverage emphasized deterrence, performance, and procedural control, post‐2019 discourse increasingly featured relational and preventive vocabularies such as “linkage,” “home visits,” and “warm enforcement.” Pandemic‐era reversals briefly restored coercive frames, yet post‐2022 governance reforms consolidated care‐centered narratives. Interview data corroborate this shift, identifying a routinized de‐escalation → explanation → referral → follow‐up pathway and a dual foundation of legitimacy: procedural correctness and relational recognition. The article contributes to policing studies by demonstrating that homo curans represents a substantive shift in governance logic, moving beyond the binary of coercion versus service to reveal care as an empirically institutionalized dimension of contemporary statecraft.
