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Polynczuk-Alenius's article contributes to a better understanding of the racist moment in Poland that began in the aftermath of the 'refugee crisis' in 2015. It does so by zooming in on Christian far-right discourse and reconstructing a cognitive map of the social world manufactured therein. To this end, it analyses the blog of the former Catholic priest Jacek Miedlar, now a far-right activist and one of the leaders of the anti-refugee movement. In doing so, the article relies on two compatible bodies of research that have rarely been used together. Theoretically, the article approaches Christian far-right discourse as an articulation of the paranoid style and concentrates on its conspiratorial aspect. Analytically, it uses the fourfold model of authoritarian communication developed by the Frankfurt School to dissect systematically the conspiratorial tale expounded on Miedlar's blog. Accordingly, the empirical analysis of 116 blog posts treats the following themes: 1) the discontent diagnosed by Miedlar (anti-Polonism, epitomized by the suppression of nationalist and Christian values in favour of European universalism); 2) the alleged operators of anti-Polonism (the Jewish-orchestrated conspiracy bent on dominating the world and its puppets); 3) the movement that will rise up against this cabal (namely, the Polish Catholic nationalists armed with conservative values); and 4) the leader of the struggle (Miedlar himself as a Christ-like martyr figure). The article concludes that the anti-Muslim discourse, premised on an appeal to racist sentiments, served as a gateway into the conspiratorial, deeply antisemitic world-view of the Christian far-right milieu. In Poland, as elsewhere, such a world-view, stored and transmitted through the fringe far-right discourse, usually seems to gain traction in wider society during times of crisis.

This conceptual article proposes an approach to ethical consumption which is an alternative to “political consumerism”. By illuminating the aspects typically overlooked in political consumerism research, it re-embeds individualized ethical consumption in (1) the broader movement, (2) the communicative process, and (3) the social context. By adopting the notion of “ethical trade” it decenters individualized consumption as the exclusive way of enacting ethics in the marketplace, and by focusing on communication, it turns the spotlight away from individual consumers and onto organizations. Drawing extensively on communication studies, it is proposed that the main function of ethical trade organizations is to mediate between the geographically separated consumers and producers. Furthermore, greater sensitivity to the social context is introduced by distinguishing between two modes of mediation: “mediated familiarity” (the transmission of factual knowledge and the construction of affinity) and “moral education” (the subjectification of consumers who consider their impact on “distant others”)

This article analyzes how conspiratorial knowledge and bio-power were entangled in the Polish government's discourse to undermine the 2020 Women's Strike protests against the curbing of access to legal abortion. Theoretically, it uses Foucault's "bio-power" to conceptualize both the assault on reproductive rights and the securitization of ensuing protests based on "conspiratorial knowledge," which uses conspiracy theories as a heuristic device to understand social changes. Empirically, discourse analysis is deployed to interrogate a video-recorded speech by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the country's de facto leader, posted on YouTube in response to the protests. First, the article exposes how the protests are recast as a conspiracy bent on the legal, biological, and moral destruction of the Polish nation. Second, it examines how a small sample of remediations of the video by oppositional media and women's rights activists refutes the conspiratorial knowledge it promulgated. Throughout, the article also identifies the "(quasi-)cognitive" and "affective" forms of epistemic capital.

This article contributes to a better understanding of the ‘anti‐immigration’ discourse that has prevailed in Poland following the electoral victory of the Law and Justice party in 2015 by theoretically engaging the category of ‘race’ in the examination of Polish nationalism. To do so, it employs the Foucauldian perspective on racism, understood as deployed in defence of one's own nation, which is imagined as "race". The article also contextualises this discourse by elaborating how three globally circulated racist themes (threat, unworthiness and otherness) are deployed to uphold three components of hegemonic Polish national self‐definition (vulnerability, deservingness and ‘Westernness’) against three aspects of the perceived liminality that destabilise this self‐definition (temporal, moral and spatial). The article concludes that in Poland, the ‘anti‐immigration’ discourse deploys racism as a device symbolically to ‘protect’ the imagined ethnically, religiously and culturally homogenous Polish nation from the belittlement and dilution of collective self‐definition under the conditions of globalisation.

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To introduce economic justice into global trade, fair trade organizations strive to ‘shorten the distance’ between producers and consumers through mediation. This article problematizes the idea of ‘shortening the distance’ through the notion of maintaining the ‘proper distance’ in representing distant others. This perspective is used in narratological analysis of the content that fair trade organizations curate on their Facebook pages to represent Southern producers. The two organizations studied are: (1) Fairtrade Finland, a non-governmental organization (NGO); (2) Pizca del Mundo, a commercial brand in Poland. This article identifies the discursive and narrative forms of mediated agency that are offered to producers. The analysis revealed that Fairtrade Finland utilized Facebook to extend the narrative of producers as active subjects. By using the affordances of Facebook, Pizca del Mundo increased the mediated agency of producers but problematized the maintenance of the proper distance in their representations.

The objective of fair trade to achieve economic justice through markets depends on establishing, via moral education, bonds of solidarity between Northern consumers and impoverished Southern producers. Moral education is increasingly realised by commercial brands who take advantage of the opportunities offered by social media. This article analyses the discursive construction of solidarity in the brand communication of Pukka (UK) and Pizca del Mundo (Poland) on Facebook. It identifies 3 discourses of solidarity: ‘solidarity through legitimation’, which presents the rationale for solidarity with Southern producers; ‘solidarity through affinity’, which constructs a moral economy between Southern producers and Northern consumers; and ‘solidarity through lifestyle’, which proposes everyday actions that can be undertaken by consumers to support Southern producers. These discourses are employed by the brands to different extents, with Pizca del Mundo attempting to establish a fair trade market in Poland and Pukka with an aim to increase sales of their fair trade products. The article concludes that primarily the discourses of ‘solidarity through legitimation’ and ‘solidarity through affinity’ serve moral education whose objective is to generate sustained commitment towards Southern producers as distant others.

Nico Carpentier's book, The discursive-material knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation, is an ambitious project that sets out to examine the ‘Cyprus problem’, and to explore the...