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In this paper I seek to initiate a research agenda on mega-urban airs that comprehends their atmospheres as simultaneously meteorological and affective (McCormack, 2008), an agenda which seeks to apprehend megacity air/atmospheres in their vitality, corporeality and expressiveness. This paper attunes to the close and expressive substances that make up immersion in a material-affective ecology of a place, the qualities of the city that seep and imbue its material and biological fabric with affect. There is a growing body of work and literature to aid us from traditions in continental aesthetic theory, French urban sociology and architecture, and an emergent cultural geographic field of atmospheric enquiry. The paper develops such an approach to megacity air in three main ways. First, air tells us about difference. In the testimony of pollutants and choking effluvium, an analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not in a constellation of megacity inequality. The atmosphere puts the megacity apart from other urban and political forms. Second, closely related to the issues that circulate around a geopolitics of verticality and the technocratic security concerns of volumetric conceptions of territory, air/atmospheres constitute an environmental ecology of security threats and crisis that thwart megacity life and justify environmental policies as ‘security’ (see Zeiderman, 2013). Third, the paper argues how megacities are increasingly productive of secessionary atmospheres, often by removal and exclusion, which are not entirely separate from other atmospheric security concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is an attempt to make sociological sense of the 2008 American election - particularly of the phenomenological observation of extraordinary enchantment and almost amorous attraction which unlikely members of the American population displayed for Obama, from the early days of the campaign onward. I draw on charisma theory to argue that sociology has something surprising to say on the phenomenon, and on the metaphor of the pipe to add detail about the technology of attraction that was in play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of evangelical Christianity across the globe is characterized by both a high degree of similarity in liturgy, symbolism and methods of organization and communication, and at the same time a remarkable ability to plug in to local indigenous rituals, symbols and practices related to possession and magic, to disease and healing. This poses complex questions for understanding ethnicity and also cultural globalization, which are explored using contemporary and historical sources relating to South and West Africa and to Brazil. The ability of those evangelical churches which advertise their ability to transmit healing powers most insistently, to transpose healing from individual to community, to replace mystery with transparency, is set against their opportunistic and clientelistic political involvements and lack of transparency in their organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]