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We seek to shape an agenda for the growing interest in using sociological approaches to study the European Union (EU). In order to deepen and broaden the Europeanization agenda, the article points to how sociology can help reveal the 'social bases' of European integration (i.e. processes of European Union), as well as identify effects on European society that might reconnect EU studies with key comparative political economy debates about the European 'varieties of capitalism' and its models of economy and society. Unfortunately, however, 'sociological' approaches towards the EU have mostly been wrongly equated with the 'constructivist turn' in EU studies, and its characteristic preference for 'soft' qualitative discursive methods and meta-theory. We argue that, rather than turning to culture, identity or social theory for inspiration, an empirical sociological approach to the EU would reintroduce social structural questions of class, inequality, networks and mobility, as well as link up with existing approaches to public opinion, mobilization and claims-making in the political sociology of the EU. To conclude, the article identifies some exemplary studies along these lines.

Доказывается, что для анализа специфики парламентаризма требуется совмещение правового и политологического подходов. Выделяются уровни анализа комплексной сущности парламентаризма. Особое внимание уделено интеракционному уровню анализа, его составляющей — парламентской культуре. ; The paper provides on overview of issues in study of contemporary parliamentarism. The author shows that analysis of developmental features of parliamentarism needs a combination of legal and political science approach. The author further defines analysis levels to determine a complex nature of parliamentarism with a focus on interactive level of analysis and parliament culture as its component.

Cover -- Title page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword: Then and Now: Comparative POV on Activist Media, by John D. H. Downing -- Introduction: InsUrgent Projections, by Chris Robé and Stephen Charbonneau -- I. US Radical Histories -- 1. Men and Dust, Labor Advocacy, and Alternative Film Distribution, 1939-1942 / Tanya Goldman -- 2. Subjugated Histories as Affective Resistance: US Abortion Documentaries, Middle-Class Resistance, and Botched Political Subjectivity / Angela Aguayo -- 3. Setting the Terms of Our Own Visibility: A Conversation between Sam Feder and Alexandra Juhasz on Trans Activist Media in the United States / Sam Feder and Alexandra Juhasz -- 4. Seeing What the Patrimony Didn't Save: Alternative Stewardship of the Activist Media Archive-A Conversation between Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr / Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr -- II. Indigenous Resistances and Indigenous Issues in Canada, the United States, and Australia -- 5. Coming to the Fire: Collaboration across Cultures in Media Activism / Sam Burch, Lisa Gye, Kristy-Lee Horswood, Daniel Marcus, and Oliver Vodeb -- 6. The Program(ming) Is Political: Documentary, Festivals, and the Politics of Programming / Ezra Winton -- 7. Mobilizing with Video in the Extractive Zone / Dorothy Kidd -- 8. Idle No More as Digital Nation / Kristi Kouchakji and Jason W. Buel -- 9. Letting It Seep In: Ojibwe Filmmaking Duo Adam and Zack Khalil Discuss Political Filmmaking as Covert Ops / Ezra Winton -- III. Community Media in the Americas and Asia -- 10. Media Activism through Community: A Case Study of Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources / Ruth Goldman -- 11. Community Organizing and Media Activism: The Case of v-artivist in Hong Kong / Chun Chun Ting -- 12. WhatsApp Messaging and Murder in Mexico / Kara Andrade.

Elvis, the hidden king of rock and roll. Messianism, revolutionary delusion and birth of new pop fetishisms. Taking inspiration from Simmel's insight regarding the presence of hidden kings in every distinguished cultural epoch, this paper explores the forms through which pop culture has got to generate new models of power, capable to set new standards by means of intrisic capabilities of overcoming social distortions the political power could not overtake. Elvis Presley, its myth, and the fetishisms derived from his stardom, condensed a number of Western stereotypes, subsuming counterposed social consciousnesses. In Presley's figure, social antinomies are smoothed out through the delusion of a revolutionary pledge, that eventually comes out to be socially reassuring and equitable with an epiphany.

The collection of letters by Cardinal Granvela in the Royal Library, with letters to Antoine Perrenot and memorandum of the burgundian, are an invaluable resource for scholars of Habsburg's Monarchy in the 16th century. The collection sheds light on a wide range of subjects, from the mechanisms of governement and military geopolitics, to court intrigues and european artistic life. Following a brief introduction that looks at the importance of letter-writing as means of exercising political power in the 16th century, the present article advances a theory about the provenance of the collection based on a close reading of the letters and focuses on its impact on written culture by a brief commentary of the author's letters.

China's multi-faceted endeavour to expand its influence in Africa has attracted worldwide scholarly and media attention. This article examines the different moments of China's soft power endeavour, from projection through its state media to representation and lived experiences in South Africa and Zimbabwe, two African countries which receive a significant level of attention in China's policymaking. Through interdisciplinary methodologies such as content analysis, online questionnaires and in-depth interviews conducted in China, South Africa and Zimbabwe, the authors found that China's state-engineered soft power initiatives have resulted in partial success in the two countries. The conclusions indicate that China faces many challenges in fully accomplishing its intended goal. The findings provide new insight into China's political impact in Africa within the context of Beijing's growing influence on Africa's political and economic future.

Revisionism's rise to prominence in the 1970s coincided with the emergence of feminist history. Yet the two shared little, and revisionism's insistence on the autonomy of politics was at odds with the feminist analysis of power and politics in household and community relations; as feminist historians sought to expand the conception of the political, revisionists sought to narrow it. Yet revisionism had much in common with a strain of social history that focused on the particular and local as against broad narratives of change, and emphasized stability and consensus rather than conflict. However, both the social and political history of early modern England have to be able to account for the conflict that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century. This essay shows how gender, and particularly gendered inversion, provides a way to pull together social, political and gender history.

The paper explores the ideological influences in the period of the socialist system on the new urban landscape, and also on design of the typological models of residential units built in Belgrade. After the Second World War, one of the main policy goals of socialism was to solve the housing problems of Belgrade, by building the modern, serially manufactured and economical housing architecture. The period of intensive construction of housing architecture of Belgrade in the period of socialist self-management is primarily related to the achieved quality of housing in this period in terms of environment humanization and functional organization of housing units. This paper explores new concepts and principles of housing architecture with the emphasis on the impact of spatial-functional apartment transformation on the family lifestyle and the formation of a new socialist culture of dwelling. Since the problem of housing is interdisciplinary, the transformation is studied out through detecting the relations of cause and effect among ideological social changes, culture of habitation, technical and technological criteria and functional-spatial house structure. The modern housing urbanism and architecture has become a representation of social, political, economic, demographic and cultural changes of the period.

Considers the role & functions of history, particularly in a postmodern sense, as a source of counterhegemonic discourse in the Third World's search for political identity. History (of all types) is seen as providing a sense of communality & community that gives meaning to a group, gender, or nation & helping society legitimate its beliefs. It is shown that Western colonizers have marginalized or eliminated the histories of conquered peoples, substituting the discourses of development, modernization, & democratization to redefine the Third World in the West's image. The counterdiscourse of the South against the North is described, with the postmodern search for alternative discourses contrasted with the modern roots of universal mobilizing ideologies. It is concluded that, despite depriving the Third World of agency, postmodernism offers a way to transmit the voice of the marginalized & oppressed, providing "new universalism." A reconstruction of the Third World historical project is urgently needed. T. Arnold

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE ROLE OF THE COURTS, ESPECIALLY THE SUPREME COURT, IN FACILITATING THE DEVELOPMENT OF A CAPITALIST ECONOMY AND ENHANCING CORPORATE POWER. THEORETICALLY, THE AUTHOR EMPLOYS AN APPROACH WHICH TREATS THE LAW AS A CONSTITUTIVE PROCESS. HE FIRST SURVEY KEY LEGAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY THROUGH WHICH THE COURTS FOSTERED AND NURTURED THE DEVELOPMENT OF A CAPITALIST ECONOMY. THEN HE ANALYZES THE POST-NEW DEAL ERA, EXAMINING THE TRANSFORMATION OF ECONOMIC DOCTRINES BY THE SUPREME COURT TO LEGITIMATE A NEWLY EMERGENT CORPORATE-ADMINISTRATIVE STATE. IN THE LAST PART OF THE ARTICLE HE USES THIS HISTORICAL ANALYSIS TO ADDRESS CONTEMPORARY ISSUES FOR THE LEFT OF HOW TO BRING ABOUT FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE IN THE UNITED STATES. HE DISCUSSES THE DEGREE TO WHICH THE LAW CAN BE USED AS A MEANS OF PROGRESSIVE REFORM AND HOW STRATEGIC LEGAL CHOICES ARE RELATED TO THE DEBATE ABUT SOCIAL MOVEMENT, DISCOURSE, CLASS-BASED, AND POLITICAL STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE.

AbstractThis article takes up German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's attention to air and atmospheres to argue for the influential part "objective" thinking plays in disseminating viral pandemics. It follows Sloterdijk's broad approach to "air-conditioning" to interpret the way modern cultures increasingly work to explicate and construct objective figures of (and in) air. A fundamental, yet invisible, "anthropopoietic" element, air resists the forms and figures we use to describe it. This is acutely demonstrated by airborne viruses like COVID-19 and the pandemics they create, where the medial willingness to perceive or "figure" the air becomes a critical, everyday necessity. When Sloterdijk attributes the spread of "affective epidemics" to mass-media technologies, he draws attention to how airborne transmission is a symptom of breathing the same air, which, by affecting and altering air-conditions to reproduce identical figures all across the globe, increases its spread. This article argues that the willingness to make air objective—in both senses of identifying its material properties, and believing in a uniform or consensus figure—eradicates the possibility of vital difference. In doing so, inhabiting what Sloterdijk calls the "World Interior" of reproducible sameness that props up international exchange, modern, globalized culture becomes far more susceptible to the rapid spread of epidemics. Virality is increased by the sameness of objective air-conditioning, and by reintroducing difference into the atmosphere we can bring back its life-giving potential.

Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, when the goal of transforming Delhi into a 'world class city' envisioned, among other measures, a reining in of the city's frenetic signboard culture. This paper examines the ingenuity of the hand-painted signboard which employs complex visual strategies such as three-dimensional depth cues, typographic innovation and visual metaphor, while assessing the unique ways in which hand-painted signage shapes the experience of public space in an urban environment. Against ideas of uniformity and order which underpin liberal modernist visions of the city both in relation to its visual cultures and the use of public spaces, this paper proposes what we call an 'aesthetic of accommodation': the visual and the social order here become sites for the expression of an 'adjustment' ethic visible in the hybrid art practice of hand-painted signboards and the multiple rather than single usage of public spaces evident in the manner in which signboards spill onto sidewalks and sidewalks onto streets.

This research analyses the imbrications among institutional change, conflict, and political power in the Colombian presidential system, taking as a case study the points of the Integral Rural Reform and Political Participation of the Havana Peace Agreement, during the plebiscite for peace and the «Fast Track» implementation in order to approve the law changes in the Congress. The question that guides the analysis is the following: Why do the Havana Peace Agreement implies an institutional change and what are the changes projected by it? The study applies a sociological neo–institutionalism approach, which allows the analysis of the institutions embedded in the culture and social structure. The methodological strategy used is the qualitative case study. The analysis shows that the potential changes in political rules and in the access and use of land must be carefully considered within broader and historically sedimented institutional configurations. The institutional change sought to modify the power arrangements in the institutions; however, their roots in the social structure and culture were not taken into account in order to effect this modification. ; En este artículo se analizan las imbricaciones entre cambio institucional, conflicto y poder político en el sistema presidencialista colombiano, tomando como estudio de caso los puntos de Reforma Rural Integral y Participación Política del Acuerdo de Paz de La Habana durante el Plebiscito por la Paz y el Fast Track. A partir del enfoque del neoinstitucionalismo sociológico, el cual permite analizar las instituciones incrustadas en la cultura y la estructura social, se analiza por qué el Acuerdo de Paz de La Habana es un cambio institucional y cuáles son los cambios proyectados. Algunos hallazgos indican que los potenciales cambios en las reglas políticas y en el acceso y uso de la tierra deben considerarse cuidadosamente dentro de configuraciones institucionales más amplias y sedimentadas históricamente, ya que, aunque el cambio institucional buscaba modificar los arreglos de poder en las instituciones, no se tuvo en cuenta el arraigo de estos en la estructura social y la cultura.