Vol. 8, Issue 3: The Covid Crisis and Cultural Sociology: Alone Together
Read the issue in full here.
COVID-19 and symbolic action: global pandemic as code, narrative, and cultural performance
by Jeffrey C. Alexander & Philip Smith
Why meaning-making matters: the case of the UK Government’s COVID-19 response
by Marcus Morgan
Marking time in lockdown: heroization and ritualization in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic
by Lisa McCormick
Performing rituals of affliction: how a Governor’s Press conferences provided mediatized sanctuary in Ohio
by Celso M. Villegas
The “Societalization” of pandemic unpreparedness: lessons from Taiwan’s COVID response
by Ming-Cheng M. Lo & Hsin-Yi Hsieh
The performance of truth: politicians, fact-checking journalism, and the struggle to tackle COVID-19 misinformation
by María Luengo & David García-Marín
Covid-19 as cultural trauma
by Nicolas Demertzis & Ron Eyerman
A virus as an icon: the 2020 pandemic in images
by Julia Sonnevend
Art markets in crisis: how personal bonds and market subcultures mediate the effects of COVID-19
Larissa Buchholz, Gary Alan Fine & Hannah Wohl
Social distancing as a critical test of the micro-sociology of solidarity
by Randall Collins
Vol. 8, Issue 1: Cognition and Culture
Read the issue in full here.
The neuro-cognitive turn in cultural sociology: from 1.0 to 2.0
by Philip Smith
What can cognitive neuroscience do for cultural sociology?
by Omar Lizardo, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz & Marshall A. Taylor
How do performances fuse societies?
by Erik Ringmar
Cultural sociology meets the cognitive wild: advantages of the distributed cognition framework for analyzing the intersection of culture and cognition
by Matthew Norton
Culture and cognition: the Durkheimian principle of sui generis synthesis vs. cognitive-based models of culture
by Dmitry Kurakin
Representationalism and cognitive culturalism: riders on elephants on turtles all the way down
by Jason L. Mast
Vol. 5, Issue 3: 2016 US Election
Guest Editor: Jason L. Mast
American politics are now hurtling forward into unanticipated territories. What mad switchmen placed the US on this set of tracks?
In this special issue of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Guest Edited by Jason L. Mast, leading sociologists explain the mystery of how the 2016 US presidential election created a sense of rupture even while the cultural elements that facilitated Trump’s victory have been shaping America’s political, religious, news media and entertainment spheres for some time.
The articles in this issue explain how and why Donald Trump won the presidency, and they outline how his victory will impact the future of democratic politics, journalism, the US’s positioning in the global order, and America’s model of multicultural citizenship. The contributors present new theorizing on post-rupture politics, and charts innovative pathways forward for analysing democratic elections occurring in contexts of fractured civic epistemologies and troubled legitimacies.
Read the issue in full here.
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Fragments, ruptures, and resurgent structures in the 2016 US presidential election – cultural sociology’s new pathways forward
by Jason L. Mast
Politics as a vacation
by Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Iddo Tavory
On the construction sites of history: Where did Donald Trump come from?
by Mabel Berezin
Why evangelicals voted for Trump: A critical cultural sociology
by Philip Gorski
Muslims as outsiders, enemies, and others: The 2016 presidential election and the politics of religious exclusion
by Ruth Braunstein
A period of “wild and fierce fanaticism”: Populism, theo-political militarism, and the crisis of US hegemony
by Julia Hell and George Steinmetz
Deep stories, nostalgia narratives, and fake news: Storytelling in the Trump era
by Francesca Polletta and Jessica Callahan
Journalism after Trump
by Ronald N. Jacobs
When voters are voting, what are they doing?: Symbolic selection and the 2016 U.S. presidential election
by Matthew Norton
The fragmenting of the civil sphere: How partisan identity shapes the moral evaluation of candidates and epistemology
by Daniel Kreiss
Legitimacy troubles and performances of power in the 2016 US presidential election
by Jason L. Mast
Vol. 5, Issue 1-2: Inequality
Inequality has come roaring back onto the public agenda, punctuated by Barack Obama’s December 2013 claim that income inequality is “a defining challenge of our time”.
... But if the new object of civil concern is economic, the nature of that concern remains centrally cultural. In a special double-length issue of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, nine original articles explore the social meanings that inform contemporary discussions about inequality. Examining prisoner re-entry narratives, racialized exclusion, support programs for former foster youth, discourses of cultural mobility, and elite parenting strategies, these articles provide important new resources for thinking about culture and inequality.
Read the issue in full here.
Click here to download a flyer for the issue.
Conflicted cultivation: Parenting, privilege, and moral worth in wealthy New York families
by Rachel Sherman
A critical strong program: Cultural power and racialized civil exclusion
by Stephen F. Ostertag and Lucas Dìaz
by Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana
by Chi Phoenix Wang
by Jessi Streib
“I’m not gonna be another statistic”: The imagined futures of former foster youth
by Julianne M. Smith
by Laura Stark
Historicizing social inequality: A Victorian archive for contemporary moral discourse
by Michael Strand
by David J. Harding, Cheyney C. Dobson, Jessica J. B. Wyse and Jeffrey D. Morenoff