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How to engage with the recent crisis of liberal democracy in a politically productive manner? Using the example of Hungary, the first part of this article contrasts two empirical strategies. The first takes inspiration from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and explores the conditions of critique within the architecture and infrastructure of liberal democracy. The second empirical strategy turns to a novel by László Krasznahorkai and a film by Béla Tarr, and engages with the problem of critique through búskomorság. This common Hungarian word refers to a sad-sombre sentiment that is both collective and thoroughly political. The second part of the article focuses on an exhibition created by Béla Tarr that combined these two empirical strategies in a generative way. With the help of the exhibition and recent empirical examples, the article outlines what could be called búskomor politics – a set of critical practices that take place not so much within the architecture and the infrastructure of liberal democracy as amid its ruins.

This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi, Northern Australia. Drawing on materials and experiences from two distinct stages of this project, we revisit a policy report and engage in ethnographic storytelling in order to highlight a series of sensing practices associated with water management. In the former, a working symmetry between Yolngu and Western water knowledges is actively sought through the practices of the project. However, in the latter, recurrent asymmetries in the research work continue to appear: a bilingual diagram of water usage is displayed but produces confusion; measuring a water hole for salinity, a member of the scientific team throws in a water meter, while a Yolngu elder prefers the telling of an ancestral story; a collaborative 3-D mapping exercise invites participation from community members but struggles to develop an outcome that differs from existing maps used by scientists and government staff. Focusing on these moments as subtle points of rupture, we suggest that attending to "seeing," "telling," and "mapping" in both stages of this water management project offers a way to explore the political work of crafting climate futures and beginning to interrogate differing means for "doing difference" within them.

Das Politische drängt sich gegenwärtig in den gesellschaftlichen Vordergrund wie schon lange nicht mehr. Das Symposion nimmt diese Situation zum Anlass, um das Verhältnis von Politik und Soziologie grundsätzlich auf den Prüfstand zu stellen: Aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln wird die Frage beleuchtet, wie wir das Politische heute soziologisch denken müssen, um den gesellschaftlichen Phänomenen unserer Zeit wissenschaftlich gerecht werden zu können. Die Beiträge des Symposions loten dazu das Potential Politischer Soziologie theoretisch und methodisch aus. Gemeinsam führen sie vor Augen, dass es Grund gibt, die Stellung des Politischen in der Gesellschaft innerhalb der Soziologie viel offensiver und grundsätzlicher zu diskutieren, als dies derzeit der Fall ist. Politics and the political system have become topics of intense public debates we have not witnessed in a long time. The symposium takes stock of these debates by systematically scrutinizing the relation between politics and sociology. More specifically, it explores how we might think about politics sociologically, in a way that does justice to current social developments. The contributions to the symposium address this question from different theoretical and epistemological perspectives, thereby unpacking the conceptual and methodological potentials of political sociology. Together, they draw attention to the importance of understanding political processes in order to get a better grip on current workings of society.