- The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
- Cultural Sociology as Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
- Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
- Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
- Culture and the Economy
- Culture and Economic Life
- From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
- Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture
- Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
- Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe
- Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008
- Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere
- Rethinking the Relationship of African American Men to the Street
- Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions
- Burning Schools/Building Bridges: Ethnographical Touchdowns in the Civil Sphere
- The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture, and Power
- Globalization and Religion
- Narrative and Social Movements
- The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization
- Rethinking Conflict and Collective Memory: The Case of Nanking
- Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration
- Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the “Nanking Massacre,” and Chinese Identity
- Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts
- Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics
- Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity, and Navigating the Forest of Objects
- The Force of Embodiment: Violence and Altruism in Cultures of Practice
- Music Sociology in a New Key
- Narrating Global Warming
- Broadening Cultural Sociology's Scope: Meaning-Making in Mundane Organizational Life
- Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This article examines the epoch-making sense of Barack Obama’s historic election as U.S. president in 2008 and the heightened solidarity it produced, as well as the role of the mass media in creating such meanings. It first describes a sociological model of the public sphere by combining insights from field analysis and the Strong Program in cultural sociology, focusing on the theories advanced by Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jeffrey C. Alexander. It then considers how intellectuals, acting through media institutions, define and expand public spheres before discussing the interrelationships among autonomy, rationality, and democracy. It also explores how the autonomy of cultural production can influence the autonomy of the journalistic field and, therefore, the autonomy of the political public sphere. Finally, it explains how civil society, and its public sphere institutions more specifically, produces solidarity by making distinctions between civil and uncivil things.
Keywords: Solidarity, Barack Obama, mass media, public sphere, cultural sociology, intellectuals, autonomy, rationality, democracy, civil society
Eleanor Townsley is Professor and Chair of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. She is interested in the role of intellectuals and ideas in social change.
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- The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
- Cultural Sociology as Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
- Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
- Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
- Culture and the Economy
- Culture and Economic Life
- From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
- Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture
- Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
- Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe
- Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008
- Entertainment Media and the Aesthetic Public Sphere
- Rethinking the Relationship of African American Men to the Street
- Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions
- Burning Schools/Building Bridges: Ethnographical Touchdowns in the Civil Sphere
- The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture, and Power
- Globalization and Religion
- Narrative and Social Movements
- The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization
- Rethinking Conflict and Collective Memory: The Case of Nanking
- Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration
- Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the “Nanking Massacre,” and Chinese Identity
- Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts
- Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics
- Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity, and Navigating the Forest of Objects
- The Force of Embodiment: Violence and Altruism in Cultures of Practice
- Music Sociology in a New Key
- Narrating Global Warming
- Broadening Cultural Sociology's Scope: Meaning-Making in Mundane Organizational Life
- Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
- Index
