Legitimacy Troubles and the Performance of Power in the 2016 US Presidential Election

Mast, Jason L.

doi:10.1057/s41290-017-0046-6

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…However, because “challengers beat incumbents” through their performances, the effect of social power is contingent, not fully determinative (Mast 2013 , p. 13). This insight on contingency and social power has been productive in explaining the dramatic twists and turns in American politics in an age of high mediatization and charismatic characters like Barack Obama and Donald Trump (e.g., Alexander 2010 ; Alexander and Jaworski 2014 ; Bogard and Sheinheit 2016 ; Mast 2019 ).…”

Section: The Coronavirus Press Conference: Media Event and Performancmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If “citizen-audiences do not feel compelled to believe the truth of what they see or hear” in this partisan context (Alexander 2011 , p. 103), then it makes sense that well-researched and prudent interventions like masks, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and contact tracing can become deeply politicized. Citizen-audiences concerned about the Coronavirus may find it deeply distressing to navigate this “paralogical hellscape” (Mast 2019 , p. 262) on top of the disruptions of daily life and lives lost.…”

Section: The Coronavirus Press Conference: Media Event and Performancmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Performing rituals of affliction: how a Governor’s Press conferences provided mediatized sanctuary in Ohio

Villegas

2020

Am J Cult Sociol

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This paper studies the ritual and aesthetic performances of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's Coronavirus press conferences. It argues that the press conferences are mediatized sanctuaries-solidaristic respites from the chaos of pandemic and partisan politics. They achieve this via performing a regular ritual of affliction where basic cultural commitments are affirmed, institutional action is validated, and the where the trouble of Coronavirus can healed as a result.

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Section: The Coronavirus Press Conference: Media Event and Performancmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Coronavirus Press Conference: Media Event and Performancmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performing rituals of affliction: how a Governor’s Press conferences provided mediatized sanctuary in Ohio

Villegas

2020

Am J Cult Sociol

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“…We utilize the cultural pragmatics framework, which stresses six concepts that can be used to analyze social performances: actors, audience, mise‐en‐scène, means of symbolic production, power, and collective representations (Alexander ; Altinordu ; Mast , ) to analyze the protest vigils. Actors refers to those who perform the script and communicate meaning to audiences to whom the performances are directed.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Once in Parkland, a Year in Hartford, a Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement

Bernstein

McMillan

Charash³

2019

Sociological Forum

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Generally ignoring firearm‐deaths by suicide, “common sense” divides gun violence into two distinct types of phenomena: urban gun violence and mass shootings. At a cursory level, these phenomena seem distinct because of the difference in the number of victims killed during a particular shooting, rather than subtypes co‐creating a master category defined by gun violence. As a result, gunshot deaths of black and brown bodies in urban settings, which constitute the majority of deaths by gun violence after suicide, are viewed as routine whereas gunshot deaths in suburban settings are extraordinary and worthy of outrage. In this article, we draw on ethnographic observation to compare protest vigils in urban communities comprised predominantly of people of color, in suburban areas that are mostly white, and at the national level in order to uncover the racialized processes of symbolic classification by which this “commonsense” view is produced and how it is challenged by activists. We use the framework of cultural pragmatics to analyze these vigils, making visible the racialized forms of domination that structure activism and, we contend, ultimately divide gun violence into two distinct phenomena rather than constituting a master category. We argue that cultural pragmatics provides a way to understand what it means to challenge culture as emphasized by the multi‐institutional politics approach to social movements.

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“…In order to invest the need for a new beginning with sufficient emotional draw, progressive narratives must demonstrate the moral imperative of abandoning the status quo . Within such narratives, the ‘greater the difference between past and future in terms of perceived danger and moral urgency—damnation versus salvation; destruction versus rejuvenation—the greater the imperative for action’ (Mast 2017 , p. 473). It was therefore crucial that issues such as foodbanks, homelessness, and social care reforms were constructed as civil crises during the election campaign.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Symbolic action and constraint: the cultural logic of the 2017 UK General Election

Morgan

2021

Am J Cult Sociol

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This paper examines the influence of both the agential and structural aspects of culture on the 2017 UK General Election. The empirical section of the paper is organised around three aspects of the Labour campaign narrative: its promise to provide a national ‘alternative’, its mobilisation of Corbyn as simultaneously an individual and an icon, and its use of rallies and social media as alternative stages from which to project its meanings. It identifies the material conditioning, coding and counter-coding, narrativisation and counter-narrativisation of key events, issues, and figures, demonstrating how the substantive contestation of the campaign occurred within a consensual formal grammar that constrained symbolic action and often produced consequences unintended by cultural workers themselves. It, therefore, demonstrates how culture retained a relative autonomy in influencing meaning outcomes in part due to its formal semiotic logic. It introduces the notion of ‘code-rerouting’ to cultural sociology’s stock of conceptual tools and highlights how failure to conform to the structuring norms of civil rituals, such as presenting oneself to public scrutiny during a campaign, or failure to project coherence between surface and depth, individual and icon, past and present, or between private and public can prove fatal to performative felicity.

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Legitimacy Troubles and the Performance of Power in the 2016 US Presidential Election

Cited by 17 publications

References 20 publications

Performing rituals of affliction: how a Governor’s Press conferences provided mediatized sanctuary in Ohio

Performing rituals of affliction: how a Governor’s Press conferences provided mediatized sanctuary in Ohio

Once in Parkland, a Year in Hartford, a Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement

Symbolic action and constraint: the cultural logic of the 2017 UK General Election

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