Latest columns

gravedigging, digital shaming, digital gravedigging, social media celebrities

Online gravedigging, identity and privacy

Column

Mingyi Hou

18/02/2020

11 minutes to read

This article analyzes gravedigging as a digital practice, and illustrates its roles in online shaming and celebrity image management activities.

The monolingual bias in studies on populism

Column

Juan Eduardo Bonnin

06/02/2020

4 minutes to read

Scholarly articles written in English about populism often forget linguistic and discursive diversity. Drawing from a monolingual tradition, they tend to overlook linguistic and discursive diversity in the political processes they study.

Conservative critiques of identity politics as divisive

Column

Rosalyn Negrón

21/01/2020

11 minutes to read

Rosalyn Negron unpacks the logics that underlie conservative critiques of left identity politics and zooms in on the specific significance of this discursive frame among conservatives.

Elisabeth Warren, clickbait and truth

Column

Jan Blommaert

20/01/2020

6 minutes to read

Elisabeth Warren's statement on her male contenders being "electoral losers" enables us to examine the ways in which clickbait actually works.

Trumps Tweetopoetics

Column

Jan Blommaert

17/01/2020

6 minutes to read

Trump speaks in tweets. But his tweets are made for speaking too.

Twitter politics: the next stage

Column

Jan Blommaert

14/01/2020

6 minutes to read

Two recent incidents on Twitter in the wake of the US attack on Iran's general Soleimani show us how Twitter continues to define politics as we know it.

Someone in New York finally put me on a panel …

Column

Kevin Doyle

13/01/2020

8 minutes to read

Kevin Doyle sees a vast consolidation and compression of human experience into more and more narrow and predictable terms. The unique language and vocabulary that innovative forms of the arts provide us can be an antidote, according to him.

Get Brexit Done: Why storytelling is so important for electoral success

Column

Philip Seargeant

20/12/2019

5 minutes to read

How the Conservatives’ winning communications strategy in the UK general election mixed new media techniques with traditional forms of persuasion.

Did Brexaustion kill Corbyn's media strategy?

Column

Jan Blommaert

20/12/2019

12 minutes to read

Analyses of Corbyn's social media campaign overlook something: the fact that politics is played out in a weaponized hybrid media field.

Marcuse's grave, cultural marxism, hoax, conspiracy theory new right

Why has Cultural Marxism become the enemy?

Column

Jan Blommaert

28/11/2019

13 minutes to read

Cultural Marxism is blamed for "globalism" and its discontents. Perhaps exploring globalization can be an alternative for this deeply flawed conspiracy theory.