Welcome to your brand-new, yet good old European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology!
By the time you read this, you will have already come across some of the major changes the journal went through at the start of 2025. We have a new publisher, the MIT Press, which means the journal has a new online home. You may also notice that the journal looks a bit different than the last time you saw it—not least because we will no longer be publishing a print edition. The journal is now entirely online. As before, authors will enjoy prompt online-first publishing of their articles after acceptance. These articles will later be compiled and published as part of online issues.
The major reason for changing our publisher was, however, the change about which we are most proud and excited: We now have the great pleasure of publishing the journal on a completely open-access basis. This means that all articles, past and present, regardless of their authors’ institutional affiliations or publishing agreements, can be shared with the broadest possible audience.
This new open-access era at the journal coincides with some backstage changes. EJCPS now has three new editors-in-chief: Laura Centemeri (CNRS), Carla Malafaia (University of Porto), and Taina Meriluoto (University of Helsinki). Werner Binder (Masaryk University) will continue as the journal's book review editor, and Linda Haapajärvi (Tampere University) will continue as its managing editor.
This is a strange moment to begin steering a journal through the stormy waters of academic publishing. We are all aware of the multitude of ways in which the system is broken: We publish too much but rarely have the time to read publications by others. Reviewers and editors are overworked and exhausted and are increasingly choosing to opt out. Publishers charge authors and institutions hefty fees to publish the results of research that is often conducted with public money. Universities and funding agencies continue to raise the bar in a competitive academic labor market that demands intense publishing track records for career advancement and to secure research funding, with junior and precarious researchers being the most affected by the “publish or perish” dynamics. We all feel that academic publishing, as we know it, is unsustainable, but we don't know what to do about it.
However, like a snowball rolling downhill, momentum for change is building slowly and steadily. In September 2024, news broke that a group of US scientists had filed a federal lawsuit against six publishers of academic journals, alleging that they had engaged in a conspiracy to sustain huge profits at the expense of scientific progress.
In the suit, the researchers claim the publishers sought to lower labor costs by agreeing not to compensate scholars for their peer review services, to reduce competition by requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time, and to control access to scientific information by prohibiting scholars from freely sharing their research while their manuscripts are under peer review.
“The for-profit academic publishing industry is in the business of exploiting the goodwill and hard work of brilliant scholars and of taxpayers who foot the bill to create their product,” Dean M. Harvey, the lawyer for the scientists, said in a news release.
The lawsuit makes serious allegations, arguing that the publishers’ conduct “has held back science, delaying advances across all fields of research.”
Regardless of the legal nuances and technicalities involved, this class action lawsuit strikes at the core of the scholarly publishing ecosystem, which has increasingly become a service industry that fuels (and is fueled by) an academic environment that relies on publication counts. These dynamics have not only contributed to the marketization and privatization of scientific knowledge but also resulted in standardized evaluations that do not fully capture the societal value of the humanities and social sciences. This has been used to justify cuts in government funding. Furthermore, in the day-to-day operations of scientific journals, these trends have led to editorial and reviewer fatigue, undermining the democratic dissemination of research findings and diminishing the vitality of intellectual debate. As the incoming editorial team, we feel compelled to start our 5-year term addressing this issue, taking a stand while framing our vision for the journal.
We feel that the EJCPS's transition to an open-access journal with the MIT Press is a necessary first step in pushing back. This is a step in the right direction toward more sustainable academic publishing, but it is not enough. As new editors-in-chief, we want to develop the journal into a community where academics publish because they want to continue the conversation, not because of metrics and numbers. We want it to feel like this is “your journal,” where you might occasionally act as a reviewer because you enjoy the debate, wish to contribute to the quality of manuscripts, and seek to provoke thoughtful reflection in the authors. We envision the journal as a welcoming space where diverse academic voices and perspectives can meet. We want to be open in more ways than just “access.” Democratic cultures of knowledge production undoubtedly require more sustainable ways of publishing, avoiding the commodification of articles and the exclusion of academics from participation in scientific debate. Furthermore, they also encompass reimagining “publishing as a relational practice” (Adema, 2021), where the logic and ethics of care are given centrality. Sustaining such a change will likely require taking risks and exploring partially uncharted territories. These include, for instance, exploring opportunities for new submission typologies alongside traditional journal articles and book reviews. In particular, we are interested in developing formats and avenues for collaboratively researched pieces to be published in a way that acknowledges their unique processes and diverse authorship.
Care is all the more important given our commitment to nurturing a plural array of voices and perspectives within the EJCPS while extending its reach throughout—and beyond—diverse European countries and cultures. This also implies broadening the journal's geographic diversity. To this end, this issue is also the first under a new editorial board. We have sought to bring in fresh voices and insights from across Europe and beyond while remaining grateful and committed to many of our long-standing editorial board members, some of whom have been with us since the journal's very first days.
Yet something familiar and unchanged remains at the journal's very heart: its scope and unique profile as a home for rigorous and innovative research aimed at understanding culture and politics together. The journal continues to serve as a key platform for highly topical discussions on what Europe and Europeanness mean and can become in the future, what democracy is and can be, what is happening to it, and how we can understand it. The journal's uniqueness comes from sociologically exploring the relationship between culture and politics, from pluralist points of view and with varied methodological approaches. The heart and soul of the journal remain unchanged amid all the changes and storms in publishing seas—and so does the continued support our journal receives from the European Sociological Association, the academic association that brings together European sociologists through its academic journals, conferences, and research networks.
This issue features articles that demonstrate the journal's commitment to a diversity of perspectives and methodologies that can inform the exploration of the intersections between cultural and political sociology.
Social movements are a prominent topic within our journal, and the contribution by Pascale Dufour, Marion Leboucher, Alexie Labelle, and Jean-Vincent Bergeron-Gaudin on “How institutionalisation of a movement fosters protest: The case of student protests in France” revisits a central issue in this field: institutionalization. Drawing on feminist approaches that conceptualize institutionalization as a dynamic process—characterized by ongoing negotiations of statuses, obligations, and relationships—the article investigates the permeability between movements and institutions. Focusing on student mobilizations in France from 2005 to 2016, the authors seek to understand why disruptive tactics are still used despite the student movement becoming institutionalized. The analysis combines Protest Event Analysis (PEA), public policy analysis of the higher education sector, and interviews with key actors from both movement organizations and university institutions. It shows that the French student movement is only partially institutionalized and that the degree of institutionalization varies according to the scale of the protest. More precisely, student protests at a local scale happen outside the institutional arrangement, which is established at the national scale, and also take place outside formal university structures. This partial process of institutionalization concerns two additional dimensions beyond scale: the material (funding and legal recognition) and the cultural (identity-building). Together, these three dimensions help explain the trajectory of the student movement in France, where contention and institutionalization coexist and even enhance one another.
Party politics is another major venue of investigation for cultural and political sociology. In “Just a joke? Humour and gender in a far-right party,” Elisa Bellè’s ethnography of sexist humor in a local branch of the far-right Italian party of the (Northern) League sheds light on the under-researched linkages between humor, far-right parties, and gender/sexuality. Moving away from the study of macro dimensions such as electoral trends or national and international networks of far-right parties, the article focuses on situated and micro aspects such as militancy and the internal life of political organizations. Based on a one-year participant-observation of the everyday life of the local League branch in Contrada (a pseudonym for a small town located in the Veneto region), the article shows how the collective life of the branch is highly ritualized and symbolically constructed as an extension of the domestic sphere, with dichotomous and stereotypical repertoires for “doing gender” that are the inheritance of rural local culture. In this context, sex jokes operate both as male-inflicted punishment to women who challenge the habitual male–female hierarchy and as a virility battle to manage internal (male) conflicts without making the conflict explicit. The first type of humorous code produces “nuanced” effects, from silencing to micro-forms of resistance and solidarity between women. The second concerns male-only conflict and is related to the dynamics of redistribution of (male) power and prestige (internal and external). In both types of humor, the standard register is that of virilism, as a cultural repertoire of “heterosexual voracity” that serves alternately to confirm male power over women or to devalorize male opponents. In the conclusion, the author calls for granting scientific legitimacy to the investigation of the emotional and affective dimensions of politics.
There are significant methodological challenges in researching how emotions, affect, and embodied experiences contribute to explaining political dynamics. This requires the development of what Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen, Magnus Paulsen Hansen, Christina Juhlin, and Marie Leth Meilvang describe as a unique “ethnographic sensitivity.” Their article focuses on a theoretical approach that has revitalized cultural and political sociology in recent decades: French pragmatic sociology, particularly Laurent Thévenot's sociology of regimes of engagement (SRE). In “Engaging with engagement: Ethnographic sensitivity in the sociology of regimes of engagement,” the authors address a methodological blind spot in Thévenot's appeal to study proximate forms of engagement “below” public modes of action. They argue for the interest of examining SRE in conjunction with nonrepresentational methodologies, specifically sensory, affective, and embodied ethnographies. The article explores the methodological implications of SRE through a dialogue with nonrepresentational methodologies around three key issues: the “plurality issue” or how to capture different regimes of engagement; the “investment issue” or how to become sensitive to how individuals define and seek valuable experiences through “investing in form”; and the “versatility issue” or how to study the dynamics of engagement, particularly the transition from trusting to doubting the “convenience” of an engagement. The authors illustrate that the relationship between SRE and nonrepresentational ethnography is not straightforward. Thévenot's approach aims to shed light on a specific dimension of social life, which is the transition from nonrepresentational to representational knowledge (or from particular to general knowledge), meaning that proximate forms of knowledge are not idealized as “truer” forms of knowledge. This shift from nonrepresentational to representational knowledge is seen as an activity in which everyone is constantly engaged. Moreover, the transformation of intimate engagements with others and the environment is fundamentally political. Thus, while “getting close” is valuable for researchers using SRE, maintaining analytical distance is necessary to understand how individuals attempt to go beyond this closeness. This challenges researchers to find ways of communicating their findings that reflect the multiplicity of engagements. The authors conclude by highlighting the “ontological ambition” of SRE as opposed to the epistemological focus of nonrepresentational ethnography.
Despite the diversity of topics, the articles in this issue share a similar orientation toward relational and processual approaches to political and cultural sociology. In her article “The mechanics of the social: Sophie Germain's adventures in microsociology,” Maria Tamboukou interrogates the genealogy of this tradition of social theory and demonstrates the relevance of the largely ignored theoretical ideas of the French mathematician and philosopher Sophie Germain (1776–1831). In her treatise Considérations générales sur l’état des sciences et des lettres aux différentes époques de leur culture, Germain opposed Comte's image of sociology as a “social physics” aimed at totalization. Germain adopted a holistic view of the natural, human, and “exact” sciences, rejecting the division between nature and society. A “transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre,” she paralleled the creative processes of poetry and science and rethought the conceptualization of the social, rejecting the individual/society divide and emphasizing the micro level of analysis. Although different from the approach later developed by Gabriel Tarde, Germain's vision of the social shared a similar critique of top-down models of “collective forces.” For both Tarde and Germain, power is not centralized but distributed and fluid, generated through processes of negotiation, competition, and cooperation. Through her “mechanics of the social,” Germain emphasizes the influence of “social tendencies” in relation to events and unforeseen circumstances that affect individual minds and bodies. In Germain's reflections on the social, political, and cultural issues of her turbulent, revolutionary time, the “micro” emerges as the place where power and desire meet in the production of realities. Despite its brevity and unfinished state, Germain's treatise is thus an unrecognized example of processual approaches to philosophy and social theory in the nineteenth century and a potentially neglected important “foremother” of Actor–Network Theory.
Now to the book reviews, which we will continue to publish regularly in the journal (although we might also experiment with other formats in the future). In our first book review, former ISA president Sari Hanafi engages with The dialogic society by Ramón Flecha (2022), which is not only available in an affordable paperback version but also—fittingly—as an open access book. More of an essay than a classical book review, Hanafi offers not only a brief exposition and enthusiastic appraisal of “dialogic sociology” as a concept and methodology but also some critical remarks, especially regarding the “heavy-handed criticism” of certain authors in the book. While for Flecha, controversial statements about sexuality by Foucault and the politics endorsed by Giddens seem to discredit their entire intellectual approach, Hanafi argues for a measured criticism that does not “establish a direct correspondence between the author's thoughts and the author's life.” Discussing an issue close to his home in Lebanon, Hanafi calls for a critical engagement with the work of Habermas, despite the fact that he has been “completely insensitive” and “one-sided” with regard to the suffering of Palestinians. According to Hanafi, we should neither excuse Habermas's failure as a mere “political faux pas” disconnected from his broader theory, nor should we simply abandon his theory—instead, we should engage with it critically. Finally, Hanafi sketches his own conception of democratic sociology, acknowledging the need for “mediation” between political adversaries (implying a “soft normativity”) alongside what could be called activism (based on a “strong normativity”).
In a more conventional review, Tom O'Brien discusses Regressive movements in times of emergency by Donatella della Porta (2023), which offers an empirical analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic as a “critical juncture” with the potential “to trigger contentious politics, both progressive and regressive.” In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, regressive movements played a more decisive role. At the center of della Porta's study is the rise of regressive movements in Italy (consisting of a plurality of actors with little organizational coherence), which she contrasts with the “higher mobilization” in Germany (largely driven by the AfD) and the “lower mobilization” in Greece (mainly centered around a “soft” Orthodox Church). According to O'Brien, “Della Porta makes a strong argument for the lasting effects of ” the pandemic as a “critical juncture” that led to the emergence of an “unholy alliance” between the far right, religious fundamentalists, and new age spiritualists. Thus, her book contributes to our understanding of the “emergence of regressive movements” and the “potential effects of […] disruptive events.”
We welcome you to make the journey with us! Let's make it a meaningful one together!
Taina, Laura, Carla, Linda, and Werner