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In this article, the author examines the cultural production of homelessness in the United States, with particular concern for the intimate connection between discursive practices and material conditions. Drawing from poststructural discourse analysis, the author traces the discursive development of homelessness and homeless people between 1982 and 1996 in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. The author explores changes in discursive practices and demonstrates how these changes produce, transform, and stabilize public knowledge about people who cannot afford housing. In conjunction, the author deconstructs current discursive practices in newspapers and examines the relationship of these practices to local political responses to homelessness. The author then discusses how discursive practices regarding poverty create particular problems, deliberations, and interventions while precluding others. Finally, the author considers the implications of the findings for class politics and social change.

The modus operandi of far-right political groups is crafted through strategic and systematic relationships between symbolic and material forms of violence. This article considers the discursive strategies currently deployed by rising far-right movements around the globe by examining the weaponization of language – the rapid acceleration of signifying practices that lay the essential cornerstones of material violence. Authoritarian governments weaponize language to amplify resentments, target scapegoats, and to legitimize injustice. The article provides an overview of the discursive strategies being used to expand and consolidate far-right politics. It focuses on four interlocking components of weaponized language: propaganda, disinformation, censorship, and mundane discourse. The article concludes by considering the unique intellectual space sociological studies of language offer for addressing the communicative and social chaos created by right-wing discursive tactics.

If scholars accept that all knowledge is socially constructed, and historically situated, we must also understand social research methodologies as historically produced social formations that circumscribe as well as produce culturally specifi c forms of knowledge. In this article I examine some of the ways in which an underlying 19th century philosophy of science constrains the ability of contemporary researchers to examine 21st century cultural complexities. In particular, I discuss how the notion of evidence derived from the physical sciences prevents social sciences from examining a range of phenomena such as routine relations of privilege and contemporary media. Taking up the argument that social sciences need social epistemologies, I explore sociological studies of language as one form of epistemic shift that would enable researchers to apprehend the circulation of power as expressed in routine relations of privilege, as well as apprehend the porous social relations introduced through media old and new.

On 11 March 2011, an earthquake of a 9.0 magnitude and the consequent tsunami destroyed Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant. Known as 3/11 in Japan, the effects of this triple disaster will continue for decades. How did the media covering the catastrophe articulate issues of risk to the general public? This article is a textual analysis of accounts about the Fukushima disaster published between 11 March 2011 and 11 March 2013 in four of the most prominent media outlets in the United States. In particular, the analysis explores the practices through which these US media constructed the presence and meaning of public health risks resulting from the nuclear meltdown. The article illustrates how systematic media practices minimized the presence of health risks, contributed to misinformation, and exacerbated uncertainties. In the process, the study demonstrates how the media created vernacular epistemologies for understanding and evaluating the health risks posed by nuclear radiation. The article concludes by weighing the implications of the vernacular epistemologies deployed by media.