Trump,proto-presidency,and the rise of sane supremacy

This articles opines that America’s far-Left is sowing the seeds of ‘sane supremacy’: first, by unapologetically tarring President Trump as ‘insane’ for political purposes; and, second, legislating for psychiatry to colonize the White House so as to remove Trump on account of his suspected ‘insanity’. This article deploys an anti-sanist lens and uses the notion of ‘prototypicality’ to show how the regressive far-Left portrays Trump as not meeting the ‘normative’, ‘proto-presidential’ standard. Instead of depicting Trump as mentally unfit, we need to focus on his politics and their effects.     

The practice of ‘Othering’ in reaffirming white working-class boys’ conceptions of normative identities

This paper considers how the practice of ‘Othering’ is used by white working-class boys in Boremund, South London to mark identity boundaries and reaffirm their habitus. Through unearthing themes of difference within the young men’s accounts, the work identifies various ways of ‘doing masculinity’ in two social groups, ‘Boremund Boys’ and ‘emos’, who contrasted greatly in style but who were of the same race, class, and ethnicity. Focusing on the identity negotiations of a small cohort, aged 14–16, the data indicate how a normative white male identity specific to this locale is policed and how ‘Othering’ is employed as a strategy. Using Bourdieu’s tools alongside the hermeneutic of heteronormativity, the research explores how emos, through inverting a traditional working-class masculinity, brought the habitus of Boremund Boys into disjuncture. Within the field of masculinity, the habitus of Boremund Boys, through a process of reorientation, reconciles competing and contrasting conceptions of what it is to be a white working-class male in South London.     

National Politics,Neighborly Politics: How Trump’s Election Impacted a Black and White Detroit Community

Most research on right-wing populism has tried to explain the rise of populist movements and parties. While some have studied how neighborhood contexts and histories shape voting patterns, few have examined what happens locally after votes are cast. This article draws on three years of ethnographic research while the author lived in Brightmoor, a majority black, minority white poor depopulated Detroit neighborhood, to show how Trump’s politics shaped local expressions and experiences of racism. First, I show how white Trump supporters expressed distinct approaches to xenophobic ethnonationalism and racial politics. Trump’s surge empowered many to broadcast anti-immigrant sentiments, while they continued to put interactional and discursive work into not being seen as racist. Many also applied a “Trump lens” to local interactions and geographies and rendered minorities salient under Trump politics hypervisible. Second, I show how black residents equated xenophobic ethnonationalism with antiblack racism: seeing through pro-Trump whites’ attempts to separate these. Some also applied a new “Trump lens” to interactions and geographies, using the category of Trump voter and a sense of the voting map to anticipate and make sense of racist interactions. This article offers new insights into the local impacts of a national surge in right-wing populism.     

MILK BARS,STARBUCKS AND THE USES OF LITERACY

The starting point for this article is the passage on ‘The Juke-Box Boys’ in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. This passage is often cited as evidence of Hoggart's residual, Leavisite suspicion of mass culture and his nostalgia for more ‘authentic’ working-class culture. This article moves beyond this critique by discussing Hoggart's account in relation to the broader historical shifts signalled by the development of milk and coffee bars in postwar Britain, and their more recent replacement by corporate fast-food and coffee chains. It argues that Hoggart's critique was not simply a knee-jerk fear of the new; it fed into more widespread anxieties which long predate the media invention of the ‘teenager’ or the emergence of organized youth subcultures. These anxieties were not simply about mass culture and Americanization, but also about cultural literacy, class, the relationship between the public and private sphere, and the losses and gains of rising affluence – concerns that have been increasingly submerged in post-Thatcherite political culture.     

Young precariat and a new work order? A case for historical sociology

This article assesses Guy Standing's (2011) account of ‘the precariat’ as a ‘new class' to the many exercises undertaken in youth studies since the 1980s to make sense of the changing patterns of youth employment. While Standing's focus on the experience of fragmented and casualized work in many economies which now implicates young people has value, there are significant problems with his account that highlights the some difficulties in thinking in somewhat abstracted ways about ‘structural’ change processes that do not sufficiently consider the question of time. The case of Australia's of labour market regulation since the 1890s is used to test the validity of Standing's focus on the novelty of neoliberalism after the early 1980 to explain the emergence of precarious employment. Standing's claim that insecurity is central to the ‘new precariat’ because they lack the different kinds of security enjoyed by the ‘working-class’ after 1945, highlights the need for an interpretative framework attentive to the longer term role of state policy and the interplay of historical and local processes. The case is then made for developing a historical sociology that engages with what is now happening in respect to young people and their employment security.     

‘Cycles of disadvantage’ revisited: young people,families and poverty across generations*

ABSTRACT

One of Andy Furlong’s abiding concerns was to show how the problems of working-class youth are often, straightforwardly, the outcome of inequalities in employment opportunities. On rarer occasions, however, this explanation fits less well. Some young people grow up in families where poverty seems more deeply embedded and inherent to those families. Here, old ideas about a cultural ‘underclass’ can be tempting to politicians and policy makers. Our qualitative research, with 20 families living in extremely deprived U.K. neighbourhoods, showed that neither a simple lack of job opportunities nor ‘cultures of worklessness’ explained why hardship persisted for them. Our argument is that circumstances which appear to fit with the idea of an inter-generational, cultural ‘underclass’, in fact, have their provenance in a semi-permanent constellation of external socio-economic pressures bearing on successive generations of families over decades. Examples did include a shared context of declining job opportunities but extended to a contracting and disciplinary Welfare State, punitive criminal justice systems, poor-quality education and the physical decline of working-class neighbourhoods. We take one example – the destructive impact of local drug markets – to uncover the complex, obscure processes that compound the disadvantage faced by working-class young adults and their families over generations.     

Voting to belong: the inevitability of systemic Islamophobia

In this article, I connect Muslim American voting practices to the ‘good Muslim’ trope. Tracing participation of members of Islamic Representative Organizations (IRO’s) in election cycles from 2000 to 2016, I argue that elections have been a site for Muslim Americans to negotiate a sense of belonging in the U.S. My research reveals deep cynicism about the transformative potential of elections and a sense that systemic Islamophobia (i.e. militarism and surveillance) were perceived as inevitable. IRO members opted instead to vote as a way to articulate the presence of Muslims in the U.S.; for instance, Muslims ought to ‘make a statement’ by voting against Donald Trump or for the first woman candidate. In this way, voting can be understood as an articulation of a ‘good Muslim’ subjectivity through which IRO members seek legitimacy within, rather than a dismantling of, an Islamophobic milieu.     

FROM JUKE BOX BOYS TO BOBBY SOX BRIGADE

Through its analysis of the complex discursive struggle over Times Square's – and later America's – ‘bobby sox brigade’, this article reintroduces young women into historical and theoretical accounts of youth culture. In doing so it challenges subculture and moral panic theories for their over-emphasis on working-class masculinity and their inability to account for the complexity and localized specificity – both historical and geographic – that such case studies command. The bobby soxer and the conflicting debates she engendered must be understood as a product of wartime contingency and in relation to the contested discourses within and between different localized contexts and media forms; the bobby soxer was simultaneously positioned as the key problem of wartime and promise of the post-war prosperity ahead. This article ultimately proposes a theoretical framework focusing on localized and contested terrains of discourse, appropriate to (sub)cultural activity in times of war and other disruptions.     

Masculinities and fathering

There is a developing body of research regarding fathering, in the UK, but the experiences of African-Caribbean and white working-class fathers, and how their experiences are mediated by gender and ethnicity have been neglected. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in research by reporting on the similarities and differences within the stories of African-Caribbean and white working-class men about fathering, and to examine the personal and structural dimensions to these experiences using Connell's theoretical framework for understanding masculinities (1995, 2005). Qualitative, semi-structured individual interviews were undertaken with seven white and six African-Caribbean fathers. Findings indicate that African-Caribbean fathers, specifically, their associated practices, regarding children's ‘behaviour’ and learning, with experiences of racism that they anticipated their children may encounter in the future. Both groups of men's stories demonstrated limited reflexivity about the unequal distribution of domestic labour within the home. The study also found that fathers’ experiences were associated with contradictory and differing forms of masculinity. The fathers’ stories provide evidence of changing forms of masculinity, for example, in ways in which fathers conceptualised fathering as enjoyable involvement with children, and the ways fathers negotiated and resisted the constraints of paid work in order to be involved with children. Findings also reinforce the importance of health and social care services reorienting their priorities to engage with fathers, and opportunities for future research, regarding the experiences of African-Caribbean fathers in particular, are also identified.     

Invisible,undervalued and excluded: Practicing working-class girlhood in affective space

In contemporary culture of Empire and its ‘cult of the self’, to be a young person means to be recognized, and the display of the self is read as a display of value. However, working-class girls who are economically oppressed, marked by a history of racialization, colonization, and stigmatization are assigned no value, thus remaining unrecognized. In this article, I explore the affective economies circulating for female youth who are navigating both marginal social conditions and experiences of long-standing exclusion in urban Canada. This article draws from a two-year long critical and visual ethnography conducted at a drop-in social service center for youth and the adjacent neighborhoods, where I explored the everyday gendered youth culture of a group of Canadian, working-class girls who are marked as ‘a problem’. Here I uncover the role of affect in working-class girls’ attempts to be recognized in various aspects of their everyday life. I also discuss how affective economies operate as the present expression of the girls’ collective histories to reveal the structures in place that produce the abject girl.     

The Janus‐Face of Whiteness: Toward a Cultural Sociology of White Nationalism and White Antiracism

While the sociological study of white identity has traversed many stages, its most recent turn emphasizes the contextual heterogeneity of whiteness. Because of this increased attention to context and locality, the study of whiteness has never been more amenable to cultural analysis than it is today. Hence, an emphasis on different white racial formations that span a political spectrum from conservative to liberal and racist to antiracist is now dominant. In this vein, white nationalists and white antiracists represent the distinct polarities of contemporary inquisitions into white identity formation. Motivated by this academic milieu, this article first reviews the common perception that whiteness is in ‘crisis’ and polarizing into antagonistic political projects. Second, the article scans the literature on white nationalist and white antiracist groups, making explicit the relation to cultural theory. Third, the article questions why these two groups are consistently juxtaposed against one another and how such a conceptualization hinders, rather than advances, cultural analysis. Fourth and last, the article advanced a cultural sociological framework for understanding white racial identity formation that neither collapses white identities into a monolithic collective nor reifies white formations as a static typology. Such an approach considers the general processes and contexts which produce ‘whiteness’ and give it meaning, as well as illuminates the social relationships and practices in which white racial identity formations become embedded.     

Abjection and self‐identity: towards a revised account of purity and impurity

Kristeva describes abjection as ‘the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck’. Her account of the ‘abject’ has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s, in part due to high demand for theoretical attention to themes of purity and impurity, which remain important in contemporary society. Yet Kristeva herself has noted that ‘my investigation into abjection, violence and horror … picks up on a certain vacuum’, and other scholars have agreed that there is need for further work on what Campkin has described as an ‘under theorized’ topic. This article will begin by exploring the central line of criticism that has been made of Kristeva's concept of abjection, before then considering an attempt by Goodnow to address these concerns through a re‐reading of Kristeva. Goodnow's re‐reading of Kristeva, together with some conceptual clarifications from Hegel, will point the way towards a more precise account of purity and impurity. I shall contend that Kristeva's work on social abjection sometimes hits upon a pattern, which greater conceptual precision will be able to revise into a new social theory of when and why themes of purity and impurity are invoked in Western societies. It will be argued that impure phenomena are those in which heterogeneity is seen to disturb a qualitative homogeneity, taken to be basic; pure phenomena are those understood to be all‐of‐a‐piece and as a result identical with their essence.     

Calling for accounts: numbers, monsters and membership1

This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts ‘pass muster’ and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co‐presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like ‘action at a distance’. Taking numbers to act as ‘bearers of culture’, the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to ‘occasions’ in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets. The article begins by exploring how ‘calls to account’ are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such ‘gaps’ affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of ‘co‐presence’.     

The more attacks,the more retweets: Trump’s and Clinton’s agenda setting on Twitter

The present study aims to contribute to the agenda setting theory and political campaign literature by examining candidates’ tweets and their effects on voter reactions in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Content analysis of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s 3-month tweets (N = 1575) revealed that half of their tweets were attacks, and those attacks were effective in attracting favorites and retweets for both candidates. Their tweets reflected their issue agendas highlighted on campaign websites, and they mainly emphasized issues owned by their parties in both venues. Some of the issues Trump stressed in his tweets (i.e., media bias and Clinton’s alleged dishonesty) drew significantly more favorites and retweets, suggesting public agenda setting possibilities through Twitter. None of the issues Clinton emphasized were significant predictors of favorites and retweets. However, visual elements such as pictures and videos were effective in bringing voter reactions for Clinton. While Clinton sent twice as many tweets as Trump did during the three months, Trump’s tweet received in average three times as many favorites and retweets as Clinton’s. Overall, the results show that Trump was more successful than Clinton in drawing public attention to preferred issues through Twitter.     

Abe Lincoln in the Age of Obama and Spielberg

Writing of Abe Lincoln after the Civil War, Frederick Douglass foreshadowed a natural divergence when evaluating the 16th president. ‘Viewed from the genuine abolitionist ground’, observed Douglass, ‘Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country … he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined’. Douglass himself concluded that ‘Great Emancipator’ had largely failed to imagine anything approaching a biracial America, remaining ‘pre-eminently the white man’s President’. Taking their cue from Douglass, scholars in our own time have largely concurred. A central tenet of Civil War history since the 1950s has revolved around the notion of a great chasm dividing the ‘dull and indifferent’ Lincoln from the zealous and idealistic abolitionists. Only recently, almost coterminous with the ascension of Barack Obama to American presidency, this divide seems to have shrunk and the evaluation of the radicals and the reformer president shown signs of what I call ‘convergence’. Prominent historians now view the radicals and the Republican leader more synoptically. Hollywood has reinforced the new Lincoln in the public eye. Stephen Spielberg has joined the scholars in giving us a Lincoln for the Age of Obama. How long this convergence view will last is open for debate, with the Trump era already reminding Americans that the stark divisions of the present suggest fundamental rifts in the past.     

Lights of disenchantment: a study of Max Weber’s thesis on the ‘disenchantment of the world’ from the perspective of visual studies

At the end of 1917, during a conference at Munich University, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) made a bold announcement: ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”.’ In this article, I provide an interpretation of the notion of ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Subsequently, I present visual material that might further illuminate Weber’s idea. In the third part, I strictly concentrate my attention on one argument suggested by Weber: in ‘disenchanted’ societies ‘mysterious incalculable forces do not come into play anymore.’ Through two exemplary sculptures by the Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1884), I continue my visual excursus on the ‘disenchantment’ thesis by connecting Weber’s account on the intellectualisation of religious world-views with the autonomisation of the aesthetic sphere. The overall ambition of this article lies in providing an introductory account to an important intellectual problem and historical process through visual and textual analysis.     

‘Life is a state of mind’ – on fiction,society and Trump

The article undertakes an allegorical double reading of Being There and Trump as instances of what we call socio-fiction. Crucially in this respect, reality and fiction are not two opposed realms. The two realms always interact in subtle ways, which is why cinema can be a resource for diagnostic social analysis. We first articulate a general commentary on the relationship between cinema and society, introducing the concept of ‘socio-fiction’. Secondly, we analyse Peter Sellers’ Being There, an interesting film focused on the relationship between reality and fiction. In this analysis, we elaborate on different ways of approaching fiction in a sociological prism. And finally, we discuss Trump as a fallout effect of Being There. After all, a film is not just an image of a reality, a shadow or appearance of a social fact; sometimes the reality itself seems to have become an appearance of an appearance, a shadow of a shadow.     

Understanding 2016: China,Brexit and Trump in the history of uneven and combined development

This article uses the theory of uneven and combined development (U&CD) to produce a novel explanation of ‘Brexit and Trump’ – the two shock political events of 2016. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we identify the global conjuncture of historical unevenness in which the votes occurred: how the neoliberal transformation of the advanced capitalist countries was synchronized with the radically different process of primitive accumulation in China. Second, we apply the theory of U&CD to this peculiar ‘simultaneity of the non‐simultaneous’: the ‘big country’ effects of China's industrialization, we find, were thrice multiplied by its combination with the advanced sectors of the world economy, which accelerated China's take‐off, brought forward its export phase, and widened its export profile at a moment of maximum openness in international trade. Finally, this produced the pattern of development that led to the events of 2016: the resultant trade shocks intensified the internal inequalities of British and American societies in ways that match the geography of the Leave and Trump votes. The analysis has a wider intellectual implication too, for the phenomena of historical unevenness and combination are intrinsic to the history of the global political economy; and the theory of U&CD therefore has a unique contribution to make to the field of International Political Economy.     

Missed opportunities to make PR great again: How public relations agencies responded to the Trump Presidency

This exploratory study examines approaches the world’s top public relations agencies used to respond to the risks posed by a new U.S. administration during President Trump’s first 100 days in office. Because the goal of this research was to analyze the public thought leadership of public relations agencies as displayed on their websites (not agency-client relationships), both quantitative and qualitative content analyses were carried out to examine their website content. The purpose was to identify whether agencies’ ethical counsel and leadership were demonstrated; and, if they were, through which approaches and themes.Public relations agencies discussed the Trump victory in a few ways. The most popular theme was the Columnist/Blogger/Critic approach, or a personalized reflection of agency staffers on the Trump victory. The second most popular--yet less frequent--approach was as PR Counsel, aimed at providing professional advice to prepare brands for Trump’s attacks and/or take advantages of new opportunities in the Trump era. The third most popular – the Expert approach – was an in-depth analysis of an issue (for example, health care) and a Trump presidency’s implications. This study addresses implications for risk management in the political sphere of public relations. The response of the public relations industry, as evidenced on agency websites, was less than strategic: We do not practice what we preach (or sell). Recommendations are offered for an improved response to future challenges based on issues management and ethical leadership.     

The racialisation of asylum in provincial England: class,place and whiteness

This article examines the discursive racialisation of asylum-seekers by residents of Portishead, a small English town, a process demonstrating a classed and placed set of expressions of whiteness. I study the racialisation of a diverse group of people from the bottom-up, through an analysis of residents’ letters of objection to the Government’s request for planning permission to turn a building into an asylum processing centre in 2004. Three registers of language are presented: ‘technocratic’, ‘resentful’ and ‘conjectural’. Racialisation is expressed through shared ideas about the type of space in Portishead, and the type of people appropriate for it. The space is constructed as white and middle-class: the asylum-seekers are produced discursively as neither and therefore as not belonging. I suggest that the phenomenon of relatively powerful groups constructing themselves as weak and beleaguered can be conceptualised as a form of ‘defensive engagement’.