Through theories of mediatization it is commonly understood that political institutions and participatory practices adapt to the logics of mainstream media. Today the overall media and communication landscape is becoming digitalized. Technological processes of digitalization evolve in tandem with socio-cultural processes of reflexivity and individualization in late modernity. Thus politics and ...

The article addresses the aesthetic and the political as modern modes of practice that are discursively separated, but nevertheless continuously involved in a conflictual interplay with one another. The article discusses the nature of the limits between the aesthetic and the political, and makes the argument that the interplay between the two modes of practice occurs in the shape of a variety o...

This article lays out an agenda for research on the establishment of psy cultures in Latin America. It begins by analyzing some of the debates on the nature of psychoanalysis, a discipline located between the sciences, philosophy and common sense. It argues that the place of psy cultures needs to be problematized as emerging out of modernity in a cultural space like Latin America, where the ver...

This essay examines President Nixon’s drug policy during the early 1970s, specifically the government’s reaction to heroin use by American soldiers in Vietnam. The official response, discursively (through the employment of the drugs-as-a-disease metaphor) and on the policy level, illustrated how issues of nationaland self-identity, othering, and modernity intersected in the formulation and impl...

Comparing moral panic with the potential catastrophes of the risk society, Sheldon Ungar contends that new sites of social anxiety emerging around nuclear, medical, environmental and chemical threats have thrown into relief many of the questions motivating moral panic research agendas. He argues that shifting sites of social anxiety necessitate a rethinking of theoretical, methodological and co...

In a seminal article published in 2004, John Street argued that celebrity politics has provided a greater expression for the enhancement of democratic behaviour. Consequently, this analysis builds on Street’s thesis to consider the worth of celebrity politics in an era of late modernity. To this end, it employs Henrik Bang’s and John Keane’s constructs of Everyday Makers and Monitory Democracy,...