American Journal of Cultural Sociology最新文献

Throughout his campaigns and presidency, Trump repeatedly flouted the norm prohibiting racially derogatory appeals, leading many to wonder if modern racial norms against explicit racism had eroded. Despite the centrality of the normative prohibitions against explicit racism in the scholarship of modern racisms, few examined how these racial norms operate as norms. This paper foregrounds two interventions. First, I emphasize that studies of racial norms must interrogate not only parameters of acceptable behaviors, but also mechanisms for sanction. Second, I highlight that, as all norms are simultaneously cooperative and coercive, how social actors construct the meanings of the norm itself shapes its enforcement. This paper draws from interviews with a multiracial group of 65 liberal and conservative activists to answer how they understand the acceptability of Trump's remarks and how they reasoned the actions they did or did not take as a result. I find that even enthusiastic Trump supporters recognize Trump's remarks as unacceptable. Yet, both liberals and conservatives express unwillingness to sanction Trump's behavior. This is especially the case among the understudied conservatives of color. I highlight that both liberals and conservatives refrain from sanctioning Trump and his supporters by constructing racial norms as coercive.

This article draws on 75 interviews with people of color employed in the public radio industry to analyze how cultural workers of color in white racialized organizations may develop a “sonic double consciousness”: an awareness of the racialized evaluation of voice in white institutional space. Cultural workers of color form or further develop this awareness when producing and voicing stories, due in part to the interactions with the white world that this labor entails. Employees consider existing voice models in the network, audience feedback, and interactions with editors when they reflect on what the dominant voice of the network is. Some cultural workers who do not fit the modal public radio voice react by shifting their performance; others reject directives to conform to a modal voice. Workers of color whose voices match the network’s sonic aesthetic at times question their own relationship to whiteness and reflect on their relative privilege within the organization when compared with colleagues whose voices deviate from a typical public radio sound. In reflecting on these experiences, my interviewees exhibited collective awareness of the sonic color line—a “sonic double consciousness”—through their critiques of the racialized evaluation of voice in the public radio industry.

“Iconic” images possess cultural power. This paper asks: What makes an image “iconic”? To become publicly recognized as “iconic,” images undergo a process of consecration. We argue that this process of consecration is facilitated by the capacity to perceive the degree to which an image “looks iconic.” From this perspective, iconicity is an affordance that emerges from the relation between an image’s visual qualities and the cognitive associations of a perceiving subject. The paper presents a novel method for measuring subjective perceptions of iconicity using pairwise image comparison tasks. The analysis finds that people systematically evaluate some images as more iconic than others, suggesting that images vary in their “iconic potential.” The paper assesses whether image qualities are associated with an image’s iconic potential and whether iconic potential varies across groups. There is minimal variation in people’s evaluations of iconicity, suggesting a high degree of stability. These results indicate that the process by which images become publicly recognized as “iconic” is not entirely arbitrary. Some images are perceived by individuals as more iconic than others, which may influence which images get promoted and circulated.

Abstract

The street protests in Belarus following an allegedly stolen election provide a context for an examination of the expression of public mood. We argue that political moods involve pre-agentic intuition rather than cognitively formed agency; and that they constitute a vital, too often overlooked stage of democratic action. Focusing upon such moments entails an understanding of the ways in which early impressions of situations often rely upon peripheral awareness and pre-reflective heuristics. Understanding pre-agentic action poses a significant methodological challenge to researchers who must determine how best to make sense of human responses to situations that do not yet make sense to them. The article explores the transition from mood to agency; that is to say, from generalised affective feeling to political intention and action. We looked through thousands of photographs, video clips, textual messages, voices, smartphone screens, maps and official documents that circulated online during the Belarusian protests both prior to and after the election.

Abstract

What do Palestinian and Israeli Jerusalemites see and unsee in their city? What epistemological prisms are used to construct and reify their ethno-national view of place? How do these attentional frames “filter” the spatial information? Tracing the phenomenological visibilities, invisibilities, and boundary-works in local sketch-maps and mental maps of Al-Quds and Jerusalem, the present analysis uncovers two predominant epistemological prisms, which serve as attentional filters in local perceptions of place: the residential templates of “village” and “neighborhood” and the cardinal directions of “east” and “west.” The observed prevalent perceptual reliance on these semi-neutral lenses in mental mapping authoritatively naturalizes the attentional foregrounding of spatial elements associated with one ethno-national identity and conversely reinforces the attentional backgrounding of spatial markers associated with the Other ethno-national identity. This emerging pattern of attentional apartheid reflects an extremely polarized, asymmetrical cultural classification of reality.