Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Different understandings of what it means to be critical in the social sciences, especially in terms of the distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge, can be illustrated by the ongoing conceptual disputes about the critical epistemic value of public opinion and the public sphere as the main instantiations of publicness. The concept of the public sphere has gained prominence in media and communication theory, filling a void created by the decline of critical public opinion discourse, which was overshadowed by promotional publicity and opinion polls. Initially rooted in the German concept of Öffentlichkeit, this idea was revived in the English term ‘public sphere’. Its adoption transcended disciplinary boundaries, sparking fresh critical perspectives in the study of publicness. Yet, this widespread adoption also brought about a certain dilution of the concept’s epistemic depth. The digital age, characterized by the ascendancy of the Internet and the blurring of public–private boundaries, has greatly reshaped our comprehension of the public sphere, and expanded the scope of the concept. Today, however, the public sphere concept faces a fate reminiscent of administrative public opinion discourse following the proliferation of opinion polls. At a time when society is faced with issues related to the control of digital platforms by oligarchs, reevaluation and revitalization of the concepts of the public sphere and publicness become essential for comprehending the dynamics of modern communication. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Revisiting the history of the development of software and communication technologies, this article demonstrates that while the early techno-utopian theories have been balanced by more sombre approaches, the emancipatory potential of productions whose outputs do not take the commodity form deserves further theoretical reflection. Social form and value-form literature provides a way to rethink publicly financed activities and activities of software communities as a variety of social forms of wealth and productions within capitalist social formations. Public wealth, it is argued, is a useful umbrella concept to approach the forms of wealth in the sphere of software, media and communication. With digitally storable matter, due to its replicability at near zero cost, it is of utmost importance that the state provides an institutional framework, primarily for capital, but also for public wealth, to be coded. In this setting, legal form, its content and function play a key role in the contested reproduction between forms of public wealth and capital. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The fierce loyalty of Donald Trump’s base has long mystified his critics. For 8 years now, they have expressed puzzlement that his followers support him ‘despite everything’—despite his incendiary rhetoric, his misogyny, his racial prejudices, and his authoritarianism. In this paper, I argue that, in fact, Trump’s hectic agitation is precisely what his base wants. My reading of the data—including data I gathered with my collaborator, Eric Hanley, in 2016—is that Trump owes his demagogic success to the fact that he says what his followers want him to say and acts accordingly. Donald Trump, today’s agitator par excellence, supplies what his base demands. Trump, in short, is less an architect of Trumpism than its reflex. However effectively he performs in the public arena, he remains an emissary, personifying a social movement that preceded him and will survive him. And that movement, I will argue, is authoritarian in a very specific sense—driven by a wish for a domineering leader who is loyal to his partisans and hostile to their adversaries. Analytic insight into this phenomenon is drawn, below, from a range of authors, including marketing professionals and critical theorists including Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ circulate freely today within the popular lexicon. It is an environment where objective facts have ‘become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (OED). Central here is to understand the conceptual grounding of subjective opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of social communication. My paper will draw on the Hegelian tradition of critical theory that has in unique ways unified an analysis of the nexus between socio-economic structures and epistemological frameworks. Here I name opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure of self-certainty, which receives validation within what Adorno called the Halbbildung of industrial culture, a form of social consciousness cultivated by the spread of information and economic imperative. It will be argued that the concept of opinion becomes a vital question for understanding, in this ‘post-truth’ landscape, current standards of instantaneous communication and cultural transmission. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Our study uses big data analysis to examine the influence of Marxism on communication studies throughout its history. We track citations of Marxist authors and the use of Marxist concepts in the titles, keywords, or abstracts of publications in the Web of Science scholarly database in the category of communication. We find that Marxian authors and ideas were almost completely absent from the mainstream of media studies until the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War and the Great Recession of 2008 significantly increased citations of Marxist authors. We use network analysis to identify different currents of thought or paradigmatic appropriations of Marxism within communication studies and identify five clusters of appropriation of Marx’s ideas within communication studies: Theories of Democracy, Political Economy of Communication, Critique of Power Relations, Feminism and Antiracism, and Critical Discourse Analysis. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper analyzes the complex relationship between migration and informality in the context of the Mexico–US asymmetric and subordinated regional integration process under neoliberalism. It argues that one of the main drivers of contemporary Mexican migration is the uneven distribution of the informal sector—and more precisely, the industrial reserve army of labor—among both countries. In this regard, Mexico operates as a strategic zone of reserve and social reproduction of workforce to satisfy the growing labor demand in the United States through migration. This reveals that the reproduction of the reserve labor army is essentially transnational in nature. The main link between migration and informality from below is through remittances: they serve as a fundamental component for family reproduction and for the procreation of a transnational core labor force that exerts pressure on wages on both sides of the border. Within the framework of the dynamics of informality from above, a growing flow of skilled and highly skilled Mexican migration to the United States has been unleashed, accompanied by aggressive government policies to attract talent in synchronization with the strengthening of innovation and knowledge-intensive activities in that country. We conclude that a critical aspect of informality from above, which reinforces informality from below, is the dismantling and disarticulation of Mexico’s productive apparatus in order to rearticulate it to the United States economy through the installation of export-oriented platforms that operate under an enclave logic, with imported components and under tax exemption regimes. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The literature on digital labor platforms requires a focus beyond techno-utopianism, foregrounding the role of living labor that materially sustains the fantasies of convenience ingrained in platform capitalism. The gig workers embodying living labor exhausted by location-dependent platform work are mainly migrants. Yet, greater understanding of the complexity of difference production and the gigification of work is needed. The article is prompted by the desire to understand the relationship between entrepreneurialized workers and heterogeneously produced differences within the labor power composition of gig workers active on location-based labor platforms. Drawing on ethnographic data produced together with migrant workers engaged in food delivery and cleaning gigs via labor platforms in Helsinki, the article first analyzes the organizing logic of gig work mediated via platforms through the notion of transversal entrepreneurial tendency, and second, the entwined forms of social, legal, and algorithmic difference produced among gig workers. The article argues that differentiation in labor power composition is dynamically related to the interactions required and facilitated by the platforms. The article contributes to discussions on entrepreneurialization in the contemporary world of work and the specific ways in which the social, legal, and algorithmic production of difference shape the constitutive hierarchies of platform labor. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Place attachment, the emotional bond between person and place, facilitates well-being and belonging for Mexicans in the United States. However, place attachment research concentrating on Mexican populations has not explored a key site for placemaking—the ethnic enclave. Thus, we draw on 20 interviews with Mexicans in the United States to examine how individuals form close connections to La Cuatro, an ethnic enclave in California. Despite the overall positive nature of their emotional connections within the enclave, our model uncovers paradoxical and recursive outcomes. While place attachment promotes a sense of belonging within La Cuatro, these emotional bonds are deeply tied to broader experiences of social alienation in areas outside the enclave. This alienation stems from three primary factors: (1) legal status or lack thereof, (2) racialization, and (3) pervasive anti-immigrant socio-political ethos. We propose a recursive model of place attachment that considers social context to explain the placemaking processes of marginalized racial and ethnic groups in public social spaces. This model problematizes the experiences of marginalized communities, such as Mexican immigrants and their descendants, and provides a theoretical framework to examine the interplay between place and broader society. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Sourcing practices are among the central research topics within the sociology of the media. Empirical studies have analysed what and who are the major journalistic sources, demonstrating that the selections journalists make not only depend on their subjective choices, but are connected to the norms and routines established in the profession. While invaluable, these studies are primarily media-centric and focused on small-scale investigations, meaning they regularly ignore the social totality in which sourcing is inevitably embedded. Such studies hence also pay too little attention to the external actors that provide ‘information subsidies’ to journalists. By employing the framework of the public sphere, we show that news sources should be viewed as a topic of central social relevance that touches on wider power relations within society. Sociological approaches should thus be complemented with other critical traditions, for instance the political economy of communication. The latter approach’s value is revealed in brief sketches that point to the possibilities of achieving deeper understanding of the topic. </jats:p>