Tag Archives: Article

Red Pills, Blue Books: Youth Political Consciousnessand the Epistemic Struggle between Youtube and the University

Posted on by

Elcioglu, E. F. (2025). Red Pills, Blue Books: Youth Political Consciousness and the Epistemic Struggle Between YouTube and the University. Critical Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205251348946

What happens when YouTube and the university offer competing visions of political reality? Drawing on 25 interviews, this article explores how young people navigate political meaning in the age of digital capitalism. While conservative influencers on YouTube offer emotionally charged, algorithmically amplified narratives of ‘common sense’, social science classrooms provide tools for critique and structural analysis. But access to the latter is increasingly constrained by tuition, austerity, and ideological attacks. Using a Gramscian lens, I argue that political consciousness is shaped through an epistemic struggle between two asymmetrical knowledge systems: the expansive, frictionless world of YouTube, and the embattled, slow-moving institution of the university. In tracing how political meaning is shaped across these spaces, the article shows how the social sciences can still cultivate ‘good sense’, but only when students are able to reach them.

Seeding the divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club and the struggle over US environmentalism

Posted on by

Elcioglu, E. F. (2025). Seeding the divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club and the struggle over US environmentalism. Race & Class, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968251371957

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Sierra Club, one of the most prominent environmental organisations in the United States, faced a polarising internal battle over whether to endorse immigration restrictions. Two dominant explanations have emerged to account for why immigration became such a flashpoint in an environmental organisation. One, advanced by watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, cast the controversy as a far-right infiltration, a cynical effort to greenwash xenophobia. The other, grounded in critical race and decolonial theory, argued that exclusionary politics have always been an intrinsic part of environmentalism, given its settler-colonial and eugenicist foundations. I offer a third explanation by turning to the 1970s, a pivotal moment when mainstream environmentalism briefly embraced population control as an ecological imperative. Drawing on archival records, I show how this institutional flirtation with population control − though short-lived − created an infrastructure and ideological opening that activists like John Tanton would later exploit. As population control lost mainstream legitimacy due to political backlash and the rise of laissez-faire demographic thinking, Tanton repurposed its ecological language and organisational networks to build an immigration restrictionist movement. I show how he strategically reworked liberal environmentalism to cast racial exclusion as ecological necessity. At the same time, however, the archival record reveals paths not taken, reminding us that environmentalism, like any political project, has always been a terrain of struggle.

Profile: multi-sectoral alliances in national mobilizations against extraction in Panama

Posted on by

Díaz Pinzón, F., & Almeida, P. (2025). Profile: multi-sectoral alliances in national mobilizations against extraction in Panama. Social Movement Studies, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2025.2562887

Collective action against extraction tends to occur at the local level at the sites where nearby ecological damage takes place. In Panama in 2023, protests reached a national level against copper mining by a transnational corporation and successfully terminated operations. The protests endured for a month and acted as the largest outpouring of protests in Panamanian history. This study details how a massive campaign against extraction with a successful outcome builds from multi-sectoral alliances attained in previous struggles. The lessons learned from the mobilizations provide strategies for other regions in the search for equitable environmental policies that avoid threatening ecological sustainability.

Pages: 1 2

Fuzzy Boundaries: A Mechanism for Group Accumulation of Advantage

Posted on by

Alex, H. (2025). Fuzzy Boundaries: A Mechanism for Group Accumulation of Advantage. Sociological Theory, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751251378516

This article describes a strategic mechanism, fuzzy boundaries, that groups use to accumulate advantage. In contrast to the dominant view that rigid, well-defined boundaries maximize group rewards, I argue that ambiguity in membership criteria can, under certain conditions, more effectively secure and promote group benefits. Fuzzy boundaries are defined by two features: an intentionally ambiguous criterion for inclusion and the selective, inconsistent application of that criterion to adjust the insider-outsider line as needed. I illustrate the operation of fuzzy boundaries through a historical analysis of occupational boundary drawing in the nineteenth-century United States. Ultimately, the study offers a generalizable framework for understanding how strategic ambiguity in group boundaries can serve actors seeking to preserve privilege across domains, such as education, hiring, and professional accreditation. Unlike well-defined qualifications, the malleability of fuzzy boundaries often insulates them from legal challenge, making them an effective mechanism for maintaining social and institutional advantage.

Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War

Posted on by

Acosta, L. (2025). Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War. American Sociological Review, 90(6), 947-984. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251371066 (Original work published 2025)

Contrary to the classical sociological view that social conflict reinforces preexisting political divisions, this article argues that civil war can reinvent them. I examine this phenomenon through the evolution of civil wars in Colombia in the mid-twentieth century, a period initially marked by a Liberal–Conservative conflict that developed into a civil war between the state and communist guerrillas. Drawing on archival records, oral histories of civilians and combatants, and newspapers, I demonstrate that when one party invents an “imagined third”—an actor, external to the original conflict dyad, who lacks any connection to an actual military or political threat—to blame for the violence in civil war, a self-fulfilling logic turns the imagined third into a tangible enemy of the nation, thereby creating a new fault line. In Colombia, politicians’ baseless accusations and preemptive actions against Communists activated three mechanisms of fault line formation—enemy legitimation, boundary demarcation, and identity shift—that materialized the very revolutionary threats they claimed to prevent. This analytic framework of fault line formation in civil war opens new avenues for examining how political discourse can become self-fulfilling, how international threats are transformed into local enemies, and how wartime actors’ opportunities for action evolve—including the conditions necessary for sustained peace.