Search Results (112)

This article examines how artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems are reconfiguring truth regimes in digital societies, introducing the concept of “Artificial Truth” to describe an emerging form of epistemic governance where knowledge production and validation become infrastructural functions of sociotechnical systems. The study develops an integrated theoretical framework combining Foucault’s notion of truth regimes, Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital and fields, and Actor-Network Theory’s constructivist approach. Through conceptual analysis, the article investigates how algorithmic recommendation systems, generative AI, and automated fact-checking operate as epistemic devices that actively shape what is recognized as credible, authoritative, and true in public discourse. The analysis reveals three fundamental transformations: (1) the restructuring of trust economies, with epistemic authority shifting from institutional expertise to platform-native capital based on engagement metrics and affective proximity; (2) the emergence of generative AI as an epistemic actor producing “synthetic truth” through linguistic fluency rather than propositional understanding; (3) the institutionalization of computational veridiction in algorithmic fact-checking systems that translate situated epistemic judgments into probabilistic classifications presented as neutral. These dynamics configure a regime where truth is evaluated less by correspondence with reality and more by computational plausibility and platform integration. The article’s primary contribution lies in providing a unified theoretical framework for understanding contemporary transformations of epistemic authority, moving beyond disinformation studies to analyze AI as an epistemic actor. By integrating classical sociological perspectives with Science and Technology Studies, it conceptualizes algorithmic systems as epistemic infrastructures that embody specific power relations, restructure symbolic capital economies, and distribute epistemic authority asymmetrically, with profound implications for democratic knowledge, citizen epistemic agency, and public sphere pluralism. Full article

Extreme climate events in Australia are increasing. Since 2019, fires and floods have devastated all states and territories in Australia, leading to a reckoning via several government inquiries, including a Royal Commission, on how governments, emergency services, communities, and individuals prepare for, respond to, and recover from such catastrophic events. It also raises the question of how the media reports and reacts to these events; in Australia, the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), has taken on the role of emergency broadcaster. This paper employs a cross-sectional design to examine how media practitioners from ABC Canberra navigate their role as emergency broadcasters, how they prepare for and respond to emergencies, and how they interact with the community during those events. This examination includes reflections and memories from a series of interviews we conducted with these practitioners about the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/2020 in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) region. Using this design and a Bourdieusian lens, the study examined the practices of media practitioners during a catastrophic emergency and their perceptions of preparedness for future disasters. We examined how training (cultural capital), networks (social capital), online expertise (digital capital), and experience (habitus) contribute to preparedness in emergency broadcasting. The study has both a theoretical and practical contribution: theoretically, it expands Bourdieu’s cultural production model by applying it to a form of broadcasting that has not been examined in this way; practically, it contributes to our understanding of media practitioners and how they practice during emergency broadcasting. Full article

This study is grounded in the premise that local media should be understood beyond a market-oriented framework, with their social role theoretically redefined through the concept of symbolic capital. The central thesis is that the survival of local media must be regarded primarily as a matter of public interest and as a prerequisite for strengthening the democratic capacity of communities in contemporary socio-communicative contexts. Representative examples of both active and defunct local media in Serbia were analyzed to assess how, across different historical periods, they contributed to the formation and transformation of symbolic capital in local communities. The theoretical framework draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. The analysis indicates that local media functioned as institutional carriers of legitimacy during the socialist period, as spaces of resistance during the transitional period, and as sources of moral and professional capital in the contemporary era. Nevertheless, current project-based funding models and precarious working conditions undermine their autonomy and long-term sustainability. It is therefore concluded that the disappearance of local media represents not merely an economic problem but also a profound symbolic and democratic loss, as communities lose spaces of trust, dialogue, and public representation. Full article

Social acceleration and recurrent structural shocks increase habitus–field mismatch, yet similar exposure does not produce uniform trajectories of daily well-being or suicidal distress. This paper asks how comparable structural strain can generate divergent, path-dependent outcomes and why suicidal vulnerability may persist after objective conditions improve. We develop a theory-building, concept-driven framework that integrates Bourdieu’s practice theory with social and behavioural scholarship on stress, anomie, and despair, and conceptualises these dynamics as social hysteresis. The regime-based model specifies two ideal-typical response orientations through which mismatch can stabilise: an anomic regime marked by shame, withdrawal, and inwardly directed harm, and a radicalising regime marked by grievance framing, moral indignation, and organised participation, without implying violent extremism. Represented through hysteresis loops, the framework implies multistability, asymmetric switching thresholds, and scarring, providing a mechanism for persistence and non-linearity in distress trajectories. The model derives testable expectations for longitudinal panel and experience-sampling designs and suggests that prevention and intervention design should combine reductions in mismatch with relational and institutional infrastructures that facilitate regime shifts and reopen the space of possibles. Full article

This article examines the relationship between the Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI), a Muslim umbrella organisation, and the Indonesian state. It focuses on the dynamic role that MUI has played in public health issues and the national lottery. The two topics were chosen to focus on MUI’s partly contradictory role in its relationship with the state of Indonesia. While MUI has largely played along with the state on issues of public health and family planning, it has stood in opposition to and provided moral resistance to the state on issues of gambling and the national lottery. The analysis uses the theories of Bourdieu on symbolic capital and power, and the resource dependence theory as analytical tools. The article discusses how the state depends on the MUI’s religious legitimacy regarding policies like family planning and COVID vaccination. It has used its symbolic capital to mediate between divine revelation, public morality, and state authority. The MUI has played a paradoxical role through the dual processes of halalisation and haramisation. In contrast to halalisation in areas such as commerce, the MUI has stipulated the haramisation of gambling executed through a national lottery. Full article

This study investigates parents’ experiences of partnerships with their children’s preschool teachers in Sweden, focusing on two questions: (1) How do parents describe communication with preschool teachers, and what information about their child is valued? (2) How do parents position preschool in their child’s life? Framed through Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, the analysis examines how parents’ dispositions, values, and prior experiences shape engagement with early childhood education. Data were collected via interviews with 25 parents across three counties in western Sweden and analysed using narrative methods. Findings show that parents prioritise communication about children’s well-being and social development as central to partnership, while instructional information is largely viewed as the teacher’s domain. Preschool is primarily seen as a context for socialisation, developing norms, values, and behaviours, rather than formal academic preparation. By exploring consistencies and contradictions in parental accounts, the study offers a nuanced understanding of how habitus informs parental expectations and communication practices, highlighting the complex interplay between family dispositions and preschool engagement. Full article

Despite growing interest in transmedia edutainment, its limits—especially those experienced by students embedded in non-western educational cultural settings—remain underexamined. This article offers a theoretically grounded and empirically supported analysis of the cultural–pedagogical frictions shaping transmedia edutainment in Hong Kong higher education, focusing on students whose learning dispositions have been historically and institutionally formed by examination-oriented meritocracy and instrumentalist epistemologies. Using a mixed qualitative design combining focus-group interviews and classroom ethnographic observations, we show why implementation efforts frequently stalled and how they were ultimately absorbed by a prevailing neoliberal–Confucian educational culture that moralizes achievement and standardizes value recognition. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework, we interrogate how students’ educational illusio—animated by content instrumentalism, grade-oriented compliance, and meritocratic time-discipline—recasted multimodal engagement as instrumentalized participation optimized for legibility, security, and risk minimization. Moving beyond prevailing emphases on technological access or digital divides, we foreground habitus–field incongruence as the mechanism structuring ambivalent participation and deculturation from the intended ethos of creativity, critical inquiry, and collaborative participation. We conclude by calling for culturally responsive pedagogical shifts necessary for cultivating more genuine participatory cultures in transmedia learning environments. Full article

In the digital age, social media platforms homogenize beauty standards and intricately link clothing choices to social norms and class identities. Grounded in Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and social capital, supplemented by Erving Goffman’s theory of stigma, this study examines how social media amplifies pre-existing socio-cultural pressures that influence Turkish women’s decisions to abandon the hijab. The research has practical implications for understanding and addressing hijab abandonment. It employs a qualitative design based on semi-structured interviews with 13 participants, analyzed through a phenomenological approach. The findings reveal that the pursuit of social acceptance and resistance to social exclusion are more decisive factors in hijab abandonment than direct social media influence. While social media serves as a crucial amplifier of aesthetic ideals and a gateway to digital legitimacy, the primary drivers are deeply rooted in the pursuit of social acceptance and resistance to long-standing mechanisms of socio-cultural exclusion, stigmatization, and symbolic violence—processes intensified and mediated through digital platforms. The analysis uncovers the operation of a dual-sided neighborhood pressure, whereby women face scrutiny from both religious communities enforcing idealized piety norms and secular circles perpetuating stigmatizing labels such as backwardness or ignorance. Crucially, participants reported that unveiling was strategically employed as a means of overcoming barriers to professional advancement, gaining access to elite social spheres, and escaping the constant burden of representation. The study concludes that hijab abandonment emerges as a complex strategy of social navigation, where digital platforms act as powerful accelerants of pre-existing class- and identity-based conflicts. Full article

Sustainable livelihoods remain a vital part of health and can significantly influence overall health outcomes. In sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV continues to affect household economic stability, small-scale but sustainable livelihood interventions have proven essential for economically vulnerable families. These economic empowerment initiatives, mainly funded by non-governmental organizations, are common across the region. Despite their important role in shaping health outcomes, there is a limited understanding of the theoretical frameworks that guide their implementation and results, especially among households affected by HIV. Using qualitative methods, we applied Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital to better understand how livelihood projects are implemented among young adults living with HIV in Kisumu. Our findings indicate that livelihood interventions need more than just economic capital to be successful. Social and cultural capital, for example, help overcome barriers like stigma and foster a sense of belonging, while economic capital enables start-up activities and knowledge sharing that support livelihoods. The insights from this study are important for guiding resource allocation toward economic development and social asset building as ways to leverage different types of capital. Full article

This essay analyzes Chinese theater director Li Jianjun’s play The Metamorphosis (Bianxingji) under Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital. Reimagining Kafka’s Gregor Samsa as a package delivery rider in contemporary China, the play stages a failed narrative of storytelling through live-feed video and informs the impossibility of representing the riders’ labor resulting from the fragmented realities of postsocialist China. It thus challenges the middle-class writers’ efforts to transform delivery riders’ labor into a form of cultural capital and confronts the audience with the exploitative potential of their spectating position. Ultimately, the impossibility of representation staged by the play articulates the inequality and stratification that structures China at the postsocialist moment. The play interweaves three layers of narratives: Geligaoer’s family’s various forms of labor, documentary clips of real-life delivery riders in contemporary China, and an interplay between an external voice and the performers’ bodily movements. This layered narrative foregrounds the artificiality of storytelling and can be situated within the ongoing discussions in the recent decade in China, in which scholars and journalists attempt to secure their middle-class identities by transforming the riders’ laboring condition into a form of cultural capital. In contrast, the play stages the failure of the narrative of storytelling through a projection screen and live-feed cameras to inform the impossibility of a transparent representation of the delivery riders. By excluding the audience from the riders’ subjectivity, the play blocks the audience’s identification with the latter. Through the heavy beauty filter projected on the screen as a metaphor, the play confronts the audience with their own middle-class identity and warns them of the violence inherent in their spectating position. Full article

This qualitative comparative case study examines how culturally grounded philosophies of education shape the teaching and learning of reading in two cross-cultural contexts—an Aboriginal Australian classroom and urban Chinese elementary schools. Drawing on interpretive and reflexive methodologies, it investigates how Aboriginal and Confucian epistemologies influence literacy practices and how these practices align with or resist dominant, decontextualized models of reading instruction. Data sources include classroom observations, reading assessments, teacher interviews, and researcher reflections. Conceptually framed by Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, Habermas’s typology of knowledge, and the Caribbean concept of overstanding, this research finds that Aboriginal literacy is embedded in relational, land-based knowledge systems, whereas Chinese literacy instruction reflects moral discipline and social hierarchy rooted in Confucian traditions. This study introduces overstanding as a pedagogical stance that foregrounds ethical engagement, cultural respect, and mutual understanding. By challenging universalist models of literacy, this research offers a framework for developing dialogical, culturally responsive, and equity-oriented reading practices. Full article

This paper investigates the development of interreligious dialogue in Brescia, a prosperous Northern Italian city with approximately 200,000 inhabitants. Despite similarities to other cities in the region, Brescia exhibits an unusually vibrant “interreligious scene,” encompassing numerous initiatives, events, and platforms. We ask why this vitality has emerged and what consequences it has for local understandings of religious freedom. To address these questions, we combine two analytical frameworks. First, drawing on the concept of political opportunity structure, we examine Brescia’s genius loci—the specific institutional, cultural, and discursive conditions that fostered interreligious engagement. Brescia’s strong Catholic tradition and inclusive integration policies, together with a diverse migrant population, have created opportunities for religious communities—especially migrant groups—to participate and get recognized. Second, using Bourdieu’s concept of the field, we consider the power dynamics among actors involved in interreligious dialogue, highlighting how different agendas and positions shape interactions and outcomes. This analysis reveals the emergence of a relatively autonomous field of interreligious dialogue in which local stakes are being defined over what dialogue entails and how it should be practiced. By linking political opportunity structures with field theory, the paper shows how local contexts shape the conditions for religious freedom, while interreligious practices themselves, in turn, reshape the meaning and application of religious freedom. Full article

This study investigates the relationship between sports participation and spectatorship, two dimensions of sports engagement that have significant policy implications, by analyzing data from a 2016 nationwide UK survey (N = 1105). Scholarly research into this connection is relatively limited, especially when examined through a gendered lens. Discussing theoretical considerations of gender and the interrelations between direct sports participation and spectatorship, we utilize statistical techniques, including latent-class analysis (LCA), which enable us to uncover patterns in spectatorship and participation in the UK (two classes for women; three classes for men). We further operationalize capital by drawing on Bourdieu’s framework—encompassing economic, cultural, social, and symbolic forms of capital—to assess the resources that shape individuals’ (gendered) access to and engagement with sport. We find strong evidence for links between sport participation and spectatorship (r = 0.194 for women; r = 0.360 for men). While men exhibit a diverse range of engagement profiles, our findings indicate that women must overcome additional barriers, requiring significantly higher levels of capital and a higher degree of personal engagement to participate, suggesting that women are still disproportionately challenged in accessing this socially salient cultural form. Full article

This paper investigates layered workplace exclusions experienced by African professionals in Australian workplaces. Through semi-structured interviews with 44 participants and a qualitative phenomenological design, the study reveals experiences of subtle exclusion, workplace gatekeeping, and power struggles that African professionals face from various sources—dominant cultural groups, other migrant communities, and within their own professional networks. An integrated theoretical framework combining Intersectionality Theory, Social Dominance Theory, and Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural capital and habitus examines how overlapping identities and power hierarchies shape workplace relationships and professional belonging. The findings show that diversity and inclusion efforts often neglect the layered nature of exclusion that African professionals navigate, limiting their effectiveness. This study contributes to migration and workplace diversity scholarship by highlighting the need for inclusion strategies that address the complex realities of workplace exclusion in multicultural professional environments rather than relying on simple majority–minority binaries. Full article

Based on questionnaire data and in-depth interviews with newly arrived students (NAS) from mainland China, this study investigates the construction of their social networks and the mechanisms through which they access social support in the context of migration. Drawing on Berry’s acculturation theory, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, and Bourdieu’s concept of social capital, this study provides a theoretically grounded analysis of how NAS balance cultural distance and social needs. The findings reveal that NAS do not form social connections uniformly; rather, they strategically allocate social resources according to the degree of homophily and the strength of social ties. Specifically, weak ties with mainland peers—characterized by high cultural homophily—primarily offer emotional support; strong ties with local Hong Kong peers—marked by low homophily but high interaction frequency—mainly serve instrumental needs such as academic assistance and daily companionship; while strong ties with Hong Kong peers of mainland background combine both emotional and instrumental support, functioning as a core relational bridge in the NAS’s adaptation process. These three types of relationships form a complementary structure within NAS’s social networks. Reliability and validity tests further confirmed that four items (social satisfaction, peer attitude, sense of belonging, integration/adaptation) provide a coherent measure of social integration. The study suggests that NAS’s social practices are not merely about “integration” or “alienation,” but rather represent a dynamic strategy of balancing relational costs, cultural distance, and practical needs in the operation of social capital and characterised by dynamic negotiation and contextual adjustment. Full article