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AbstractMany social commentators have denounced the election of entertainment celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Venture, and Al Franken to political offices as indicative of American democracy's collapse, treating the political victories by these celebrities as evidence of America's preference for entertainment over political deliberation. This essay reviews the scholarly literature on celebrity and politics to provide a better understanding of this important topic. As the literature demonstrates, this conflation of celebrity and politics is not a recent phenomenon, as politicians have long employed dramaturgical elements to mobilize constituencies. Indeed, celebrities and politicians share many similarities. Both must construct public personalities appealing to their audiences and employ similar actors and strategies to help create these personalities. While some scholars working in this field agree with the concern that celebrity's presence in politics inhibits serious political discourse, other scholars contend that the use of celebrity performances by politicians may actually attract a wider segment of society to meaningfully participate in politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that future works in this area should adopt a cultural sociology framework to empirically study the meaning of celebrity for different social groups in order to gain a stronger understanding of celebrity's sociopolitical impact.

Ukraine's efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitutes a shift from duty-based norms in which citizens are required or expected to engage in civic activities, to forms of engaged citizenship which contribute not just to the state, but also to the wellbeing of those in need. In this context, volunteering facilitates the emergence of civil society that often occupies the space outside of the currently defined institutional contexts and works through the collective shaping and contestation of social norms and values. Documenting these dynamics provides valuable new insights into the important role volunteerism plays in broader sociopolitical transformations, especially in non-Western and postcolonial contexts where the processes of civil society development take many forms and may be easily overlooked.

Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning—from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from the Illuminating project at Syracuse University. Our objective is to explore how the stages of the campaign cycle shape political communication. We also explore social media platforms as additional factors. Moreover, given the distinct and anti-normative communication style of Donald Trump, we examine whether his communication is an outlier relative to his competition in the primaries and the general election, and while a challenger in 2016 and an incumbent in 2020. Our results suggest that campaign messaging changes over the stages of the campaign, with candidates more likely to advocate for themselves during the crowded primaries, and then engage in high volumes of calls to action in the general election. The 2016 posts were substantially more attack-focused than in 2020. There is some evidence to suggest that the global pandemic affected the ways in which campaigns used their social media accounts. Of note, campaigns seem to heavily rely on Facebook for all types of strategic communication, even as the academic community primarily analyzes Twitter. Finally, Trump's sum-total of his discourse is less negative than Clinton's in 2016 and more advocacy-focused, overall.

Media scholars attempt to assess how the media informs and shapes the way we view our lives. This book explores the multiple influences of television in a media landscape that is becoming increasingly fractured. The authors look at television's pedagogical role across the life cycle, and argue that despite a world of multiple screens and competing interests "everything I know about myself, I learned from television