Poetics最新文献

This article advances understanding about book reading as a sociocultural phenomenon in the 2020s. We make a contribution to the cultural sociology of reading by investigating Finnish self-identified book readers by analysing the significance of sociodemographic variables (gender, education, age, and place of residence) in terms of reading activity and access to books. Our study is placed in the context of Finnish reading culture that is characterised by a particular appreciation of reading and measures promoting equal access to culture. Based on an online survey of 955 respondents conducted in 2021, our statistical analyses show that the social stratification of book reading activity that is prominent in population level does not recur within the specific group of people who identify themselves as readers. Among Finnish self-identified book readers, education, gender, and place of residence do not induce significant differences in reading activity. Our analysis that foregrounds inclination instead of quantity as a criterion for readers sheds light on reader equality from a different direction than previous research into nationwide reading habits or descriptive studies on avid readers.

Existing research has demonstrated that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to engage with online political disinformation that traffics in partisan conspiracies. However, little is known about why this asymmetry exists. This study proposes that exposure to conflicting accounts from conflicting authorities in a given knowledge domain is an under-appreciated mechanism that increases susceptibility to partisan conspiracies and helps drive such asymmetries. To examine this question, I test two pre-registered hypotheses using two survey experiments on Amazon Cloud Research. In experiment 1, Republicans were more open to conspiracies at baseline but exposure to conflicting accounts made strong Democrats more open, eliminating this gap. In experiment 2, the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts is weaker but still contributed to closing the partisan gap, while Democrats’(but not Republicans’) self-reported media consumption heavily moderated the effect of exposure to conflicting accounts on belief. Implications of these findings are discussed for research on political polarization and disinformation as well as non-political knowledge domains.

Sociologists usually conceptualize events as unexpected occurrences bringing about long-lasting transformations of social structures. Following this definition, most empirical studies of events focus on pre/post-measurement strategies. Yet not all events are unexpected (e.g., Eurovision, Oscar nominations, the Olympics). Moreover, pre/post-measurements cannot capture the temporality in which meaning-making processes unfold nor account for the overlap between various events. We address these shortcomings by introducing the concept of ‘recurrent events,’ defined as events occurring with regular and recurrent cadence, charging collective effervescence and anticipation among audiences. Drawing from resonance theory, we conceptualize constellations of cultural change happening around recurrent events. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept, focusing on the case of the Eurovision Song Contest. To do so, we build a unique dataset of Eurovision lyrics and public attitudes in 18 European countries between 1981 and 2021 to study the relationships between attitudes about sexual and gender identity and national identity and the corresponding narratives presented at Eurovision. Our findings complicate common assumptions about the duality of events, by highlighting six different configurations of cultural change. We demonstrate how the concept of recurrent events contributes to the literature on events, consider the theoretical and methodological implications, and provide recommendations for future research.

This article reports the findings of an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) of ten interviews with participants aged 13 to 23 from international contexts on youths’ experiences of literary socialisation. Guided by affect theory and cultural geographies, the research examines the affective intensities arising from those experiences that render possible digital participation around books, reading and writing. Consequently, we aim to contribute to understanding youths’ literary socialisation dynamics and the role of digital media in young readers’ literacies. Through the notion of space as an interrelation of trajectories, we could analyse these participants’ experiences around spatial nodes of home, school, circle of friends and community. The findings led us to conceptualise four orientations of youth to digital literary participation: literary kinship, literary intuition, literary intimacy, and literary activism. Finally, we discuss digital algorithmic mechanisms in literary socialisation through the lens of critical literacies.

Much of the research on cultural and creative industries has been ‘Western-centric’, but recent interest into cultural and creative industries in the Global South confirms that this conceptual frame is not always directly transferable. This first comprehensive analysis of the last three decades of cultural and creative industries in Santiago de Chile is based on detailed participant observations and multiple in-depth interviews with cultural professionals in the city. The findings indicate that ‘Western’ economic narratives fail to capture the role of Chile's political and cultural context, and especially the socio-urban fabric of Santiago itself, in the eclectic mix of practices that has developed across various locales. The city's self-transformation can be seen to embody a process of autopoiesis, a concept first proposed by Chilean scholars. This cultural autopoiesis has been impacted by external shocks that include COVID-19. The study advances existing empirical and theoretical understandings of the development of cultural and creative industries in the Global South and beyond.

In Trentino and the Pyrenees, the population of bears has grown since the 1990s, when new specimens were released into the wild to recover this endangered species. The reintroduction generated a conflictive cohabitation with village dwellers, the shepherding sector, and rural initiatives in both areas. The aim of this research is to evaluate how local media and two audiovisual documentaries covered the bear issue in both regions. The researchers analysed the content of 86 articles from two newspapers in 2022, conducted a narrative analysis of the documentaries and interviewed their directors. The results reveal that the documentaries created a counter-narrative to politicisation, in the Italian case, and to environmentalisation, in the Catalan. Because both documentaries paid attention to rural communities, they contributed to increasing rural agency, an aspect aligned with the filmmakers’ motivations at the inception of both productions. The authors argue that the circulation of these narratives diversely expresses renewed imaginaries of rural societies in both contexts.

As we are now rounding up our second year with COVID-19, studies have provided insight into the pandemic's impact on news practices around the world. However, most of these accounts describe data from the early months of the outbreak. Further research is needed to explore the shapes that news repertoires might have settled into in the wake of the pandemic. By comparing data from a Latent Class Analysis of news repertoires using the Digital News Report 2020 and 2021, this paper contributes to extant knowledge of the pandemic's impact on news use in Flanders. We find that users were significantly more likely to adopt Casual rather than Limited news repertoires in 2021, pointing to a potential growth in news habits of users with a previously limited repertoire.

While many public performances of culture were shut down during much of the pandemic, the homes of many artists became prominent places for making culture. In particular, the pandemic created a rift in the temporal and spatial organization of work and leisure, affecting time management. This article turns to the creative lives of 32 novelists in Sweden who were interviewed online over video in 2020 and 2021. Using the example of these authors, the article investigates the impact of the pandemic on actors in culture who, to a large degree, already work creatively in physical isolation. The pandemic became an external shock affecting the temporal organization among authors and their ability to juggle commitments in life. For some, the pandemic situation appeared to create a rare slowdown of their relationships to their creative lives as well as a synchronization of spheres of life, feelings of resonance, and time for writing. As their regular activities disappeared and commitments weakened, others felt a non-resonant slowdown in their creative capacities. Those whose lives were intensified by new or additional work to make ends meet lost time for creative work, with writing becoming a guilty pleasure in response to the pandemic as a trauma. The research results emphasize the temporal conditions for making culture at home during the pandemic and argue for the general importance of studying temporal organizations of careers and art-making.

A world in movement is visible in the arena of the performing arts. Since the “long summer of migration” (also known as the 2015 “refugee crisis”), the field of performing arts for a young audience in Sweden has shown a growing interest in staging migration while elaborating new artistic strategies and modes of participation. Migrant/non-white youth share the stage-audience encounter with a white audience born in Sweden, while meeting and interacting with content, including the staging of identities, belonging, and experiences of being “other.” But knowledge about the meanings of these stage-audience encounters is lacking. This article aims to visualize and analyze the potential of repair processes through laughter in the stage-audience encounter of one specific play: Tre Streck. This analysis enables consideration of the main emotions in a civil repair process that addresses recognition gaps. The paper builds on ethnographic research and interviews and takes a theoretically informed approach, making it possible to analyze how individual audience members' emotions and self-understandings are linked to staged experiences. A theoretical contribution is suggested that involves developing civil sphere theory by conceptualizing the need to be sensitive to existential repair in micro-studies of civil repair processes.

This paper examines audience engagement at livestreamed concerts, a form of mediatised cultural consumption that saw an immense growth in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerts, as events that draw large groups of people with similar intentions, are the perfect location for the establishment of large-scale interaction rituals – moments of group behaviour characterised by a highly intense collective emotion. Furthermore, as social occasions, concerts are organised around a set of routine interactions that construct and define the collective experience. We argue that in moving online, the definition of the (concert) situation is highly impaired due to a context collapse. In comparing two distinct audiences (classical and Dutch popular music), the first aim of this research is to explore how these differing audiences adapt their cultural behaviour to the virtual sphere. Secondly, by adopting a microsociological perspective, we aim to broaden the theoretical understanding of virtual large-scale interaction rituals, an area becoming increasingly important due to the growth in online communication. This paper uses discourse analysis of the synchronised comments, left on livestreamed concerts on Facebook Live (n = 2,075), to examine the interaction between audience members. We find that both classical and Dutch popular music audiences use a form of hyper-ritualised interaction. In an attempt to combat the plurality of meanings online, they explicitly refer back to the central conventions of the face-to-face concert. This emphasises not only the significance of genre conventions, but also presents a form of virtual interaction distinct form interpersonal interaction.