As a key feature of the contemporary political landscape, populism stands as one of the most contentious concepts in political science. This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of ...populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that this new category captures an important dimension of contemporary populism that is missed by rival approaches. In doing so, we put forward an inductive model of populism as a political style and contextualise it within the increasingly stylised and mediatised milieu of contemporary politics by focusing on its performative features. We conclude by considering how this concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream and its implications for democratic politics.
Celebrations of civic rituals can be the place of an irreducible tension : having the function of commemorating the continuity of the Nation, and therefore of certifying a form of reconciled ...community, they are also the moment of expression of immediate social fractures and revising a nation-building narrative. Transcendent instances, on the one hand; moments immanent to the conflicts that mark the functioning of the political systems of the present, on the other hand, and the legitimization of a national project, finally. This article aims to compare Argentina's National Independence Day celebrations during two governments with opposing ideological orientations, focusing on this tension. On the one hand, the two presidential terms of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2008-2015), a representative figure of the center-left and usually singled out as a « populist ». On the other, the government of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), representing right-wing and center-right sectors, and self-declared « anti-populist ».
This contribution deals with the evolution of women's mobilization forms and digital activism in Tunisia and Morocco and their media coverage. The objective is to observe and describe the main demand ...topics for more individual freedoms and women's rights carried by citizen and activist actors in the Tunisian and Moroccan digital space. The study focuses on a double corpus resulting from a regular monitoring of Facebook pages, Twitter accounts as well as the Youtube platform. This analysis allowed us to point out the new forms of engagement allowed by digital media and to show the emergence, in these countries, of a new activism from below that is complementary but autonomous from classical activism.
The 2018 Skripal poisonings prompted the heavy securitisation of UK-Russian relations. Despite the ensuing tight coordination between the Russian government and state-aligned television, this article ...argues that in today’s mediatised environment – in which social and political activities fuse inextricably with their own mediation – even non-democracies must cope with the shaping of global communications by media logics and related market imperatives. With a range of media actors responding to events, and to each other, on multiple digital platforms, no state could assert full narrative control over the Skripal incident. Counterintuitively, Russian journalists’ journalistic agency was enhanced by mediatisation processes: their state sponsors, seeking to instrumentalise reporting, delegated agency to journalists more attuned to such processes; yet commercial imperatives obliged them to perform independence and professional credibility. These competing forms of agency clashed with one another, and with that of the audiences engaging in real time with the journalists’ outputs, ultimately undermining the Russian state’s efforts to harness news coverage to its political and security goals. The article concludes that in today’s global communications environment, mediatisation substantially constrains the ability of non-democracies to micro-manage journalists’ treatment of major events relating to national security.
During the 2017 Austrian national election campaign, political parties that had traditionally focused on press releases and conferences to influence the media’s agenda made extensive use of Twitter ...for the very first time. This study examines the impact of the parties’ Twitter campaigns on the substantive issue agendas of five leading legacy media outlets. Compared with the impact of parties’ news releases, the results show that, on an aggregated level, Twitter feeds significantly increase the parties’ agenda-building power, but are not influenced by the media agenda – with the exception of the personal accounts of the top candidates (particularly the new leader of the winning conservative party), who follow the media agenda to a significant extent. On an individual level, incumbent parties are the most successful in using Twitter, while small parties suffer from interactions with other parties in communicating their issue priorities (which is in line with the ‘normalisation thesis’).
As the wealthiest groups have emerged as increasingly significant in societies, this article explores society's wealth elites from the vantage point of media and communication studies. Bridging the ...literature on policy advocacy and mediatisation, the article examines the hidden and public advocacy strategies of the wealthy. Drawing from 90 interviews with the wealthiest 0.1% in Finland, this study shows the wealthy's highly strategic stance towards the media and journalism. Most of all, they prefer to avoid the media and journalism, while actively using hidden advocacy strategies and being confident in their ability to wield political influence. As a consequence, the wealth elites may remain hidden from the public eye, making them ‘shadow elites’, whose power and scrutinisation pose a challenge to society and journalists as well. The findings support the view that paradoxically, one reaction to mediatisation – the media's heightened powers – is the deliberate avoidance of it.
This paper delves into the concept of ‘enregisterment,’ which defines processes and practices linking linguistic repertoires with social meanings, by examining meta-linguistic commentary in ...newspapers. Focussing on ‘Multicultural London English (MLE),’ the study analyses 200 articles from major British newspapers (2006–2022) qualitatively and quantitatively. The research uncovers recurring linguistic shibboleths, indexically linked social meanings, and prevalent language ideologies concerning MLE and other London dialects. Results reveal a consistent emphasis on specific linguistic shibboleths repeated in articles. Indexical links for ‘MLE’ are constructed through evaluative comments, alarmist metaphors employing xenophobic immigration tropes, and loaded keywords. ‘Cockney’ and ‘Estuary English’ are portrayed more favourably and, together with ‘Received Pronunciation (RP)’, serve to stigmatise MLE. This study underscores the role of media discourse in shaping the enregisterment of dialects, contributing to social stratification and the ‘othering’ of certain linguistic varieties.
•Multicultural London English (MLE) is ‘enregistered’ in English newspapers.•Enregisterment describes the process of linking social meanings to linguistic shibboleths, thus creating sociolinguistic indexes.•Enregisterment happens against a backdrop of language ideologies, which become apparent in newspaper discourse.•MLE is often evaluated negatively in newspapers due to conservative ideologies, also in left-leaning newspapers.•Other London dialects are used to ‘other’ MLE and receive a more benign treatment in print media.
Attending and consuming events are integral to many peoples' leisure lives. However, as the literature attests, events represent significant sites of contestation over who does and does not belong. ...This paper explores such contestation in the notoriously elitist and traditionally exclusionary sport of cricket, and specifically The Hundred; the most recent attempt to democratise the sport by appealing to a more demographically diverse spectator base. It uniquely blends extensive semi-structured interviews with stakeholders (n = 33), and a synthesised theoretical framework of mediatisation, media events and digital leisure studies, to argue that the apparent success of The Hundred in attracting and including new audiences has been enabled by incorporating elements of media spectacle. We therefore, use The Hundred to further delineate the processes described in the extant literature, and extend analysis of the 'digital turn', by drawing attention to the tensions between the speed and trajectory of these developments and the constraints imposed by cricket's history. We illustrate how digital and analogue leisure remain highly interdependent, and argue that the ongoing contestation of game forms championed by different cricket stakeholders makes it improbable that The Hundred can achieve its twin goals of being economically viable, while increasing the popularity and, ultimately survival, of other cricket formats.
Navigating platform urbanism van der Graaf, Shenja; Ballon, Pieter
Technological forecasting & social change,
05/2019, Letnik:
142
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The smart city imaginary has become a recurring theme within critical urban geography and entails a distinct set of rationalities. Here, we are interested in grappling with the current ‘place’ of ...smart cities in the context of what seems to be an emerging platform urbanism, thereby highlighting a complex platform-based ecosystem encompassing private and public organisations and citizens. Our point of departure is the operationalization of three intertwined trends associated with the conceptualizations of participation, mediatisation and (multi-sided) platformisation. Through the examination of (social) traffic and navigation application, Waze, we explore manifestations of (contested) dynamics in mobility practices occurring between commerce and community in the public space of the city. The preliminary findings point to the emergence of new socio-spatial constructs which afford a better frame of ‘what is going on’, challenging the smart city framework as a planning and development paradigm. In putting forward the notion of public value and ownership, it is our aim to prompt a critical debate about platform urbanism made explicit by a driving politics that offers a window to a future driving world, urging cities and governments to anticipate and mitigate (un)intended consequences.
•Yields insights into the current ‘place’ of smart cities in the context of emerging platform urbanism.•Transactionable (spatiotemporal) sociality reconfigures the ‘coding’ of public/private behavior and driving ecosystem.•Puts forward ‘ownership’ to investigate the dynamic of built environment and human conditioning in a smart city framework.
All forms of collective memory embody attempts at meaning-making - efforts to integrate experience and provide a coherent foundation for individual and collective identities. However, different modes ...of collective memory have different meaning-making potentials. In this article, I will assess three modes of remembering, namely folk, commemorative and mediatised memory, from the perspective of how they generate integrative meaning. Each of these modes of remembrance will be examined through the prism of a case study examining the nature of the memories associated with a specific lieux de memoire. I will suggest that over time, memory becomes progressively ‘unanchored’ from localised contexts due to its increasing technological and institutional mediation and that this has important implications for the depth and kind of meaning it provides.
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