Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe article explores how cross-border heritage tourism is promoted in public schools to reimagine Hungary as an ethnically homogeneous nation by incorporating ethnic kin communities that live in neighboring countries. Cross-border heritage tourism has long served to establish strong ties to ethnic diaspora communities that live beyond the territorial borders of the nation-state. National borders in Central and Eastern Europe were repeatedly redrawn across ethnic groups over the twentieth century. Heritage tourism remains a key cultural and economic practice that symbolically questions current national borders and aims to increase the viability of ethnic enclave economies in countries where the given ethnic group is a minority. The article focuses on a large-scale student travel program that was launched by the Hungarian government in 2010, the year that marked the start of a brisk populist turn in Hungarian politics. The program provides funding to public school students for organized class trips to areas of neighboring countries (Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Croatia, and Ukraine) that belonged to the Hungarian state before World War I. It shows how the Hungarian government mobilizes the public education system to foster a narrow and exclusionary ethnic understanding of cultural membership by selectively overemphasizing Hungarian heritage in regions that have had multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multicultural histories for centuries. This project extends research on identity-based heritage tourism to show how it has become an integral part of the propaganda toolkit of populist governments.

This article belongs to the special cluster, "National, European, Transnational: Far-right activism in the 20th and 21st centuries", guest edited by Agnieszka Pasieka. Research on populism attributes great significance to mapping the distinctive discursive logic of populist reasoning (e.g., the trope of pitting corrupt elites against the people). This article aims to move beyond the primary focus on discursive structures to stress the role of symbols, objects, and different modalities of circulation in the political communication of populist ideas, using the case of Hungary. By tracing the history of one of the key symbols of nationalist populism—the image of "Greater Hungary"—from its emergence in the interwar period to its present-day use, the article shows how the meanings and material forms this symbol assumed in political communication that evolved under different political regimes. The analysis builds on extensive archival, ethnographic, and online data to highlight how the diversity of material forms and the conduits through which this image circulated have contributed to its endurance as a key political symbol. Symbols, like the Greater Hungary image, condense complex historical narratives into a powerful sign that can be easily objectified, reproduced, and diffused. Today's differentiated consumer markets provide convenient conduits for this kind of material circulation. These symbols carry meaning in and of themselves as signs, and once they are turned into everyday objects, they facilitate the normalization of radical politics by increasing their salience and broad visibility.

The essay examines street art as a lens on the workings of the contemporary public sphere to capture changing uses of urban public spaces and shifting conceptions of social order in the city. It explores the explosion in the popularity of street art at a time when urban public space is shrinking and control over its use has tightened considerably through zero-tolerance policing, growing surveillance, privatization, and gentrification. It argues that significant developments in digital media (e.g., the spread of mobile devices, photo sharing, blogging, and social networking sites) have created a new ecology for the documentation, sharing, and global dissemination of "ephemeral" street art that has fueled its popularity while complicating its commercialization, reception, and political impact. It shows how digital technologies mediate the tension between the countercultural aspirations of street art and the multiple ways in which street art is being turned into a commodity.

AbstractThe article argues that contrary to the widely held view that traces the recent rise of illiberalism in Hungary and Eastern Europe to a weak civil society, the past decade has witnessed a surge of civil society activism. But rather than working exclusively towards strengthening and complementing liberal political institutions, civil society has also provided fertile soil to the spread of right‐wing populism, radicalism and xenophobia. The analysis suggests that civil society organisations have in fact played an important role in the right‐wing radicalisation of contemporary Hungarian politics. Conservative civic groups have been instrumental in reinvigorating the symbolic vocabulary of a mythic nationalism that was widespread at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century as well as in the 1930s. The resurrection of nationalist, irredentist and anti‐Semitic symbols and paraphernalia (e.g. greater Hungary car stickers) has been a major vehicle for increasing the public visibility and political impact of these groups. The article shows through case studies of specific organisations how this seemingly anachronistic symbolic repertoire has found new resonance in contemporary Hungarian public life.

Urban sociologist, Virág Molnár, reviews the books No Billionaire Left Behind and Thank You, Anarchy. The books examine satirical activism and Occupy Wall Street's mix of direct democracy and anarchism as examples of unconventional political protest in the contemporary United States.

Flash mobs have spread, like wildfire, across the globe in recent years fuelling new uses of urban public space. The media has wondered if these events are simply pointless pranks, creative public performances, or mass social experiments in community building. Existing research emphasizes only the vital role of digital communications technology in the mobilization process. In contrast, this analysis shows through a broad range of examples from New York, London, Berlin, Budapest to Tokyo that these nascent forms of collective action are also important to examine because they provide insight into the intersection and interaction between new communications media and changing uses of physical urban space. It situates flash mobs in a historical context, constructs a basic typology of flash mob activity based on extensive Internet research, and theorizes it as a new form of sociability. It also explores how these examples of urban creativity have inspired commerce and politics to rediscover urban space, increasingly borrowing the organizational techniques of flash mobs in marketing campaigns and social protests.

▪ Abstract  In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The structure and regulation of consumption and demand has recently become of great interest to sociologists and economists alike, and at the same time there is growing interest in trying to understand the patterns and drivers of technological innovation. This book brings together a range of sociologists and economists to study the role of demand and consumption in the innovative process.The book starts with a broad conceptual overview of ways that the sociological and economics literatures address issues of innovation, demand and consumption. It goes on to offer different approaches to the economics of demand and innovation through an evolutionary framework, before reviewing how consumption fits into evolutionary models of economic development. Food consumption is then looked at as an example of innovation by demand, including an examination of the dynamic nature of socially-constituted consumption routines.The book includes a number of illuminating case studies, including an analysis of how black Americans use consumption to express collective identity, and a number of demand-innovation relationships within matrices or chains of producers and users or other actors, including service industries such as security, and the environmental performance of companies. The involvement of consumers in innovation is looked at, including an analysis of how consumer needs may be incorporated in the design of high-tech products. The final chapter argues for the need to build an economic sociology of demand that goes from micro-individual through to macro-structural features