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This paper contributes to the social theoretical foundations of a sociology of media and communication by making use of the cultural–historical school in psychology. Such perspective gains relevance in digital capitalism and the blurring of production and Internet usage. The paper first revisits Habermas's influential notion of communicative action and agency. Second, it uses activity theory as an alternative, more promising way of theorising because it links communication closer to work. A model of communicative action is introduced and a conceptual link between media and human tool use is established. Third, the paper elaborates on the notion of activity in the digital world and posits that digitalisation can be understood as a 'machinisation' of mental and communicative-coordinative work. The developed perspective, the paper concludes, allows critical media and communication sociology to operate with meaningful concepts of communicative expropriation, exploitation and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-established in the literature on the economic dimensions of US college sport that it has become a site of professionalized, value-producing work that does not equitably compensate the campus athletic workers responsible for the production of value therein. Yet, while these interventions make highly compelling political economic claims, few focus on how college athletes themselves experience the system and thus the exploitation they might endure. Drawing on testimony from semi-structured interviews conducted with 25 former college football players, we aim to expand discussions of exploitation beyond debates over compensation through our analysis of the contrast between 'work' and 'play' that exists in the lives of campus athletic workers. Utilizing a non-deterministic Marxian theory of exploitation, this paper explicitly interrogates the way capitalist ideology permeates college football by centering the important tension between 'work' and 'play' that contributes to that ideology as experienced and understood by college football players. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical theory has already marked that technology often threatens civil liberties, personal autonomy, and rights. Heidegger, later Marcuse, emphasized how technology is not value-free in its own revealing power of the surrounding environment, external and inner nature. Throughout this paper, I explore how the aesthetic approach engages with critical theory and contributes to the sociology of media and communication. For this, I will theoretically survey the terms of sociality under the forces of immediate communication, ubiquitous surveillance, and the compression of time and space that Baudrillard and Virilio once problematized through the lens of critical technology theory to adapt it to media and communication studies. I contend that techno-aesthetics that converge with Rancière's dissensus can provide practical suggestions on an updated vocation of critical sociology. This article discusses the potential of aesthetic and social criticism of media for democratizing technology that Feenberg inserted. It is urgent to acknowledge the changing spatio-temporal aesthetic regimes that affect the societal imagination and limits of sociality and action to determine the next steps for achieving a commons-based society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with Manuel DeLanda's Deleuze-inspired 'assemblage theory' from a perspective sympathetic to Pierre Bourdieu's field theory. It first outlines DeLanda's proposed new 'philosophy of society', focusing on his major works in this vein, and registers some scepticism as to its originality for sociology. It then introduces and responds to DeLanda's critique of Bourdieu. Rather than simply reject assemblage theory outright, however, I draw on selected insights from DeLanda to push field theory in new directions. More specifically, I conceptualise the interplay of fields and assemblages and use notions of 'exteriority' and 'possibility space' to help conceive individual plurality of social positioning and its effects for subjectivity and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how working-class activists challenged and overcame political fear narratives during the anti-water charges campaign in Ireland (2014–2016), with specific focus on the ‘sinister’ narrative, an attempt by the government and its supporters to frame working-class protestors as violent, irrational and extremist. Rather than subscribing to the position that political fear is ubiquitous or the reflection of a general societal malaise, this paper follows Jeffries’ argument that political fear is mediated, contested and contradicted. While political fear operates most effectively when targeting expectations for normal living, it is these same expectations that offer fertile ground for opposing fear threats. Drawing on interviews from activists, this paper shows how the ‘normal living’ becomes a key context in which ‘deviance framing’ around class and gender can be reappropriated/reframed by activists, particularly through the deployment of counter spectacles and through the reframing of what constitutes legitimate emotional responses to government-initiated fear threats. Finally, while political fear can have an individualising effect, this paper demonstrates how subjective and individual acts of transgression are mediated through a collective and community lens as the crucial element in overcoming political fear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that race must be a central consideration in understanding migration in Korea, where international migrants are rapidly reshaping the national landscape. While migration scholarship on Korea has analyzed various policy trajectories, it has predominantly focused on three aspects—liberal democracy, ethnicity, and gender—largely overlooking the significance of race. First, it assumes that liberal democracy will eventually supersede xenophobia without critically examining its assumptions that are both racialized and teleological in nature. Second, by prioritizing ethnicity, it interprets discrimination against migrants through the notion of uni-ethnicity and a fear of foreignness without delving into Korea’s deeply rooted fixation on race. Third, it overemphasizes gendered migration, regarding Korea’s demographic crisis as a primary reason for accepting migrant women as biological reproducers. This paper contends that all three aspects are intricately connected to race, including Korea’s aspiration for whiteness and abjection of blackness, which significantly shape migration dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilises the concepts of social exclusion and precarity to explore the situation of migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on European countries, we first demonstrate how migrants were more likely to experience exclusion prior to the crisis and how they were further marginalised due to the public health measures. Second, we show how inadequate government support exacerbated the exclusion of migrants. Finally, we explore social ties of migrants during the pandemic, with a focus on local and transnational ties. The paper is based on qualitative data collected as part of the European Union (EU)-funded project RESISTIRÉ, which examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on vulnerable groups across Europe. Over 100 narratives with migrants were gathered during the project, and these were analysed to explore the multiple social exclusions experienced by migrants, as well as the ways they coped with being on the margins of receiving societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-wage labour migrants moving from lower- to higher-income countries have been celebrated for their strong work ethic over recent decades. The paper draws on qualitative insights from European horticulture to explore why low-wage migrants work as hard as they do. We centre our analysis on an ‘alienation–insulation’ dynamic. Specifically, we show how migrants are particularly alienated in ways that are different to that of the immobile working class. However, we also argue that migrants’ spatial (their dual frame of reference) and temporal (their liminal) agency insulates them from this alienation to some degree. It is important, in this respect, to differentiate between alienation as ostensibly encountered (an objective phenomenon) and the actual felt experiences of alienation (as a subjective phenomenon). We conclude that the alienation–insulation dynamic is a key, but underexplored, element in understanding the complex relationship between labour mobility and labour power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the material dimensions of secrecy, which have been neglected within academic research into consumption and into material culture, are ripe for sociological analysis and attention. We draw on two empirical projects – one using qualitative interviews to talk to women about their sex toys and the other ethnographically informed research into things people keep but are no longer using - to explore secret things within the home. By taking a facet methodology approach, we consider secret objects in relation to each other and interrogate how secrets are made (in)visible through strategies and practices around objects within the home and how the potency of secret objects is managed. We make two key arguments: first, considering the relationship between secrecy and intimacy, we argue that there are three dimensions of secrecy (which do not always coalesce): what is known about, what is verbalised, and what is materialised. Second, we redirect the idea of relational work to material things, looking at where things are kept, who they are revealed to and the silences around things, and argue that these practices are part of the work of everyday relationships and intimacies. The article demonstrates that objects are vital in understanding how secrecy, intimacy and everyday relationships are lived and forms part of a wider argument for the sociology of culture to centre the unnoticed and mundane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the literature on person-culture fit, we investigated how culture (assessed as national-level familism), personality (tapped by attachment styles) and their interactions predicted social network characteristics in 21 nations/areas (N = 2977). Multilevel mixed modeling showed that familism predicted smaller network size but greater density, tie strength, and multiplexity. Attachment avoidance predicted smaller network size, and lower density, tie strength, and multiplexity. Attachment anxiety was related to lower density and tie strength. Familism enhanced avoidance's association with network size and reduced its association with density, tie strength, and multiplexity. Familism also enhanced anxiety's association with network size, tie strength, and multiplexity. These findings contribute to theory building on attachment and culture, highlight the significance of culture by personality interaction for the understanding of social networks, and call attention to the importance of sampling multiple countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of media and communications was never explicitly defined – nor was there ever an explicit debate about the sub-field. Not having a clear anchor makes it hard to define what its critical component should be. Nonetheless, a rich yet disconnected tradition of sociology and critical political economy allows flexibility to reconsider communication and social relations in the broader societal dynamics of capitalism. Specifying a critical sociological approach to communication can help better define the role of communication at the micro, mezzo and macro levels of society. The multi-paradigmatic heritage of sociological theory can provide new ways of criticising communication power in contemporary society. Diverse contemporary developments in the critique of political economy give a breadth of understanding of the capitalist mode of production and its internal dynamics. Sociology can add depth to understanding social relations within and beyond the production, distribution and consumption process. This introduction sets out the framework for the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although today media and communication studies across Latin America are closely linked to critical sociology, this was not always the case. In this article, we explore how the interaction between social communication (which includes communication and media studies) and critical sociology, in the Latin American context, evolved over time. In so doing, we examine how, and in which directions, media theory has developed and how it relates profoundly with critical sociology. This piece is an attempt to summarize this process and look at current contributions that propose more inclusive and participatory media. The key argument that it took a long time for Latin America's media studies to link itself with critical sociology but once that happened, it produced a distinctive school of thought that is counter-hegemonic and directs itself towards the contestation of power and oppression by linking itself with the popular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sourcing practices are among the central research topics within the sociology of the media. Empirical studies have analysed what and who are the major journalistic sources, demonstrating that the selections journalists make not only depend on their subjective choices, but are connected to the norms and routines established in the profession. While invaluable, these studies are primarily media-centric and focused on small-scale investigations, meaning they regularly ignore the social totality in which sourcing is inevitably embedded. Such studies hence also pay too little attention to the external actors that provide 'information subsidies' to journalists. By employing the framework of the public sphere, we show that news sources should be viewed as a topic of central social relevance that touches on wider power relations within society. Sociological approaches should thus be complemented with other critical traditions, for instance the political economy of communication. The latter approach's value is revealed in brief sketches that point to the possibilities of achieving deeper understanding of the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revisiting the history of the development of software and communication technologies, this article demonstrates that while the early techno-utopian theories have been balanced by more sombre approaches, the emancipatory potential of productions whose outputs do not take the commodity form deserves further theoretical reflection. Social form and value-form literature provides a way to rethink publicly financed activities and activities of software communities as a variety of social forms of wealth and productions within capitalist social formations. Public wealth, it is argued, is a useful umbrella concept to approach the forms of wealth in the sphere of software, media and communication. With digitally storable matter, due to its replicability at near zero cost, it is of utmost importance that the state provides an institutional framework, primarily for capital, but also for public wealth, to be coded. In this setting, legal form, its content and function play a key role in the contested reproduction between forms of public wealth and capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes into exam the current literature about Big Data and data capitalism, from the perspective of the critical Internet theory. Particular attention will be placed to the ideas of data exploitation and raw data, which will prove to betray a form of digital fetishism: in short, the focus on the final results of the production process, rather than on the social relations by which the very same process is fueled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on re-reading Khaldun's economic thought in present times, highlighting his deep insight into the culture of his day. Topics include Christian Fuchs' approach to demonstrating Khaldun's anticipations of key modern concepts, Khaldun's nominations as the founder of sociology, a pioneering economist, and the first modern historian, and Fuchs' claim of Khaldun for critical political economy and his relevance to critical communication analysis.

In January 2024, Florida’s Board of Education eliminated the sociology course, ‘Principles of Sociology’ as one of its core requirements for obtaining a general social science education in its college and university system. Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz, led the charge, claiming that sociology has been ‘hijacked by left wing activists’ and is a purveyor of ‘woke ideology’. Some within the profession would agree with Diaz, and certainly, many university administrators would as well. Of course, there are varying representations of sociology, and what Diaz and others are targeting is critical sociology and its commitment to the interrogation of power. However, these political dynamics are not new. The history of critical sociology has reflected a similar pattern that it is being played out currently. The ebbs and flows of critical sociology’s place within the discipline, the state and profession’s suppression of it, its resurgence linked to external social and political forces, and its precarious existence within the university have been true of critical sociology since its origins. This paper offers a historical context for better understanding the current attack on the field of sociology and raises the question, what should critical sociologists do about it? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of pandemic governance on state regimes is a topic of lively debate. While some researchers suggest that governments may use a ‘state of exception’ to consolidate their power and introduce new methods of control, others see it as an opportunity for new civil society initiatives and social innovation. In this paper, we examine both the actions and discourses of the Polish government and its associated actors and the independent bottom-up responses of Polish society and how these were incorporated or rejected by the government. Our primary focus is on public health governance, including quarantine policies, the management of scarce personal protective equipment, related narratives and societal responses. This study is based primarily on desk research, analysis of key legislation and regulations tailored to the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland and analysis of social media (X/Twitter) discourse related to COVID-19. Our research reveals a crisis not only of governance but primarily of the neoliberal capitalist state. We conclude that governance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland showed uneven patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores how people interpret deep transformations, how they integrate them into their everyday meaning-making and what role emotion work plays therein. To do so, the article draws on the experiences of young people (n=68) in post-crisis Spain and their narratives of change. In the wake of the severe economic crisis of 2008, many of them had lost their jobs as well as their future prospects. They experienced a mismatch between their expectations of their (working) life and the actual opportunities on the precarious labour market. Disappointed expectations and crumbling future prospects made it necessary for them to search for explanations and coping strategies. The article proposes the concept of emotive-cognitive reframing to capture the ways in which the young people adapted their emotions, ideas and expectations and the different forms and directions this could take. It shows that emotive-cognitive reframing was a complex and embodied process of emotional and cognitive work in which existing patterns of explanation were questioned and partly replaced by new ones. If these explanations were individualistic in nature, people considered their emotions and how they dealt with them to be a personal matter. In this case, emotion work was more about appeasing and suppressing emotions rather than channelling them into action. If the explanations were systemic, though, emotion work consisted primarily of turning emotions inside out and redirecting them from the individual towards external actors and structural conditions laying the seeds for collective mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special issue, we explore the political salience of emotions in times of large-scale social change, emphasizing the role of personal narratives in understanding and framing these transformations. We introduce the concept of 'deep transformations' to analyse radical shifts in various aspects of life and their emotional and cultural implications. Focusing on cases from the post-socialist world and one contribution from post-2008 Spain, the issue provides novel insights into the interplay between emotions, signification, and social change. We present our contributions as addressing three distinct levels, each underscoring the importance for integrating the sociology of emotions with cultural sociology more closely: remembering change, adapting to change, and imagining change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the latest decade of Australian sociology PhD completions for differences in the number and quality of research outputs students published during doctoral enrolment. There was no evidence of a statistically significant difference between Go8 PhD students and their non-Go8 PhD counterparts in terms of either the quantity of research publications achieved, or the quality of these publications as measured by high-impact journals. There was also insufficient evidence statistically to conclude that Go8 men and Go8 women differed from one another, or that non-Go8 men and non-Go8 women differed from one another in overall quantity of outputs and publishing in high-impact journals. However, publishing success of men and women, when combined, regardless of whether they were at elite Go8 or non-Go8 institutions, showed gender had a marginally significant effect on publication productivity, men outperforming women, in both publication counts and in publishing in high-impact journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the transformation of welfare states carries far-reaching implications for property relations, there is an astonishing amnesia regarding property in research concerning the welfare state. To date, the French sociologist Robert Castel is the only thinker to have illuminated the connection between property and social rights: he understands transfer payments and public infrastructures as social property and describes them as rehabilitation of the previously propertyless. Starting out from Castel's concept of social property, the article discusses its strengths and weaknesses and elaborates conceptually on what it would mean to think of social rights consistently as social property. The authors argue that it is a worthwhile endeavour to think further with and go beyond Castel's concept of social property. This allows not only to think about public alternatives to private property and to theorise the dismantling of social rights as expropriation, but also to think further on the democratisation of social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the nature, movement, and controversies of the information flowing through a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) community-based program in a predominantly Latino migrant neighborhood of South Los Angeles known as 'the Hispanic Outreach' (HO). Combining Actor-Network and Critical Race theories enables me to examine the world of police and Latino civilians through the groups, social actions, facts, and objects that compose it, as one single, unified set of interwoven associations and processes. Findings show that the HO claims to serve the public's interests in safety in high crime environments but instead stirs local interracial conflict and Latino residents' fears over questions of citizenship, belonging, and access to resources, and deepens state penetration into communities it deems as racial threats. I show how networks are state tools that reproduce and reinforce racial power and situate these findings within the field of Critical Sociology, particularly the areas of policing and Latino studies. And this article ends with a discussion of several potential research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls for a rethinking of critical sociology. Representing classical critical sociology, the Bourdieusian paradigm illustrated domination, but its negative foundation removed actors' power, privileging sociological knowledge as capable of identifying (social) transcendental categories of thought. Latour's constructivism challenged this privilege, giving actors the political power of aggregating collectives around their common concerns at the cost of emphasizing domination and critique. We propose a critical approach that evades a transcendental perspective reliant on pure negation, producing a more positive critical sociology founded on processualist phenomenological and pragmatic perspectives, principally Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. Actors and researchers can collectively ruminate on their perspectives and concerns to challenge power structures and transform their worlds. At the center of this is the social-mien, a creative reimagination of habitus. A brief discussion of the protests and scholarship surrounding the Notre-Dame-des-Landes activists' practice of democracy highlights the utility of the approach and serves as a model for future application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the place of the child in the metaphysics and imaginary of Western colonization, racialization, and decolonization. In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, children appear not only as victims but also as a problem for which Fanon struggles to account as a theorist of decolonization as much as a psychiatric practitioner. Through a reading of one of the cases, this article interrogates the ways in which colonization attempts to infantilize colonized populations while erasing childhood, and the ways in which decolonization meets colonization by regarding childhood in the end as a misfortune. The work of decolonization, to proceed, thus would demand us to rethink childhood, and in doing so break free of Western metaphysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Stuart Hall's reading of Louis Althusser's main theoretical works. Since the early 1970s, Hall has undertaken a critical confrontation with Althusser's 'structural Marxism', rescuing those useful concepts to think cultural difference and identity, without failing to criticize his 'superstructuralist' interpretation of Marx. However, what Hall will retain as Althusser's most important contribution is, above all, his theory of ideology. In this context, I follow an idea formulated by Hall that could be read as summarizing the theoretical and political scope of Althusser's contribution to Cultural Studies: 'he enabled me to live in and with difference'. By complicating classical interpretations schemes in the Marxist tradition, Hall's Althusser may be read as a 'thinker of difference' who opens up a whole research program to reconsider class conflicts as traversed (or 'overdetermined') by gender, racial or colonial conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows that Habermas's modernism and Lyotard's postmodernism are not as antithetical as they are often taken to be. First, we argue that Habermas is not a strong foundationalist concerned with identifying universal rules for language, as postmodern critiques have often interpreted him. Instead, he develops a social pragmatics in which the communicative use of language is the fundamental presupposition of any meaningful interaction. Second, we argue that Lyotard is not a relativist who denies any universal linguistic structure. Instead, he claims that language involves a universal element of dissensus that cannot be subordinated to consensus. Third, we show that neither does Habermas defend a new version of the kind of philosophy of history characteristic of the Enlightenment, nor is Lyotard a historical relativist, but instead they both seek alternatives to these positions. The conclusion calls for more nuance in the interpretation of both perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on keynote speech by the then Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Topics include range of social movements arrayed in opposition to colonialism, poverty, and racism mobilized during the Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest; and taking the initiative by planning workshops and social actions to unsettle the discipline's establishment sociology.

Recent gentrification policies from the municipality of Rotterdam have involved the demolition of social housing, resulting in the displacement of migrant communities. These developments have been criticised by several United Nations Special Rapporteurs as violating the human right to adequate housing. Through qualitative content analysis of municipal policy documents and expert interviews, this article examines how whiteness is preserved in Rotterdam municipal housing policies between the years 2006 and 2022. Using critical race theory, this study identifies three key stages through which whiteness is preserved: in the conceptualisation of theories underpinning policies; the language codified in policy documents, and the implementation of the policy. This research offers a clear example of systemic racism today; how it operates through policies that villainize low-income migrants and justifies the maintenance of the status quo of racial hierarchy in Rotterdam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]