Jayson Harsin

WTF was Kony 2012? Considerations for Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (CCCS)

This article discusses the (in)famous Kony 2012 (Kony) viral video, which had a record-100 million views in six days. It discusses its unique status as a viral advocacy video by NGO Invisible Children (IC) to make Joseph Kony “famous.” Theorizing Konys eventfulness entails insights for twenty-first-century communication and critical cultural studies, which note the obsolescence of past critical trends in CCCS: especially regarding virality, imitation, attention, affect, citizenship, subjectivity, power, control, participation, and protest.

THE LOST HISTORIES OF AMERICAN ECONOMIC RIGHTS

This article examines the concept and the discontinuous historical usage of the term ‘economic rights’ in American political discourse from the perspective of democratic political freedom. It views the idea and ideology of ‘economic rights’ as a discursive marker pointing to historically contingent relations between government, national economy and individual freedom. It focuses on the only two American presidential articulations of an Economic Bill of Rights and their conjunctures: one by Franklin Roosevelt and another by Ronald Reagan. These two articulations represent two opposing political traditions of economic rights in the United States: the neo-liberal laissez-faire free market tradition and the liberal welfare-state tradition. Both of these liberal traditions are haunted by an older democratic-republican discourse of economic rights, from which they continue to draw normative and affective energy without ever confronting its guiding premises. Contemporary popular discourses about the economic crisis demonstrate the continuation of deeply entrenched though historically outdated understandings of the promise and possibilities of individual freedom and autonomy within the folds of a society completely transformed by capitalist modernity. Present considerations of this history reveal possible resources for political struggles.

Trump l’Œil: Is Trump's Post-Truth Communication Translatable?

ABSTRACT Around the world, journalists complain that Donald Trump is untranslatable. Yet he is challenging even for many Americans to comprehend. In this think piece, I argue that Trumps post-truth statements need a deeper cultural and historical contextualization to be rendered comprehensible or translatable for significant portions of cosmopolitan citizens, not to mention Americans. Using the example of the emergent popular cultural genre of “outrageous Trump statements” in “listicle” or “greatest hits” form, I translate Trump through a series of post-truth developments in journalism, social media communication, and political communication, amidst historically specific cultural backlashes, some of which are globalizing.

Interview with Armand Mattelart

Armand Mattelart: When I began my research my concept of power was modeled on a state of the world at the time. In the 1960s and still in the 1970s there was a real inequality of exchanges. During the 1970s there were rising demands from so-called third world countries. It was about a new world information order. I think it’s important to recognize that. We thought about everything in terms of those inequalities, and also in terms of cultural imperialism because the United States was the center of the global economy. From that moment there were different critiques of those unequal relationships, but I think there were reasons explaining a common notion of cultural imperialism. Cultural Imperialism wasn’t born just anywhere.

Cultural Studies and/of Economic Rights: Neglect and Promise

This article theorizes the historical non-relation between cultural studies and economic rights discourse, tracing it to ideal typical distinctions between economy and culture in early cultural studies; Karl Marxs influence on Left thought generally via his critique of bourgeois rights; and Foucauldian governmentalist treatments of rights as neoliberal technologies of control and treatments of economy as having no agency of its own but rather as an effect of governmentality. It then introduces a case-study conjunctural history of American economic rights as a history of present American citizenship and politics in order to demonstrate the historically contingent articulations of individual freedom, government, and economic relations, which are not easily explained by the Marxist or Foucauldian vocabularies. The conjunctural history provides cultural studies research with a new perspective for attention to radical democracy and critiques of neoliberal capitalist policies without surrendering the utility of rights to (neo)liberalism.

Tactical Connecting and (Im-)Mobilizing in the French Boycott School Day Campaign and Anti-Gender Theory Movement

Gay marriage movements have swept across much of the globe and each has had localized alliances of opposition. This chapter focuses on a splinter group from France’s anti-gay marriage movement La Manif Pour Tous (LMPT, Everyone’s Protest), the Boycott School Day Campaign, to analyze the rhetorical and technical-connective means by which this movement-imaginary cohered, became activated, and captured, in spurts, the field of political sensibility. It was organized through mobile phone databases and social media groups, where key nodes bridged otherwise disparate networks with common appeals, one of which was the “rumor bomb” claiming that the introduction of “gender theory” in primary schools included teaching children to masturbate. The chapter charts how these rumors were used to launch a niche public school boycott across France in 2014.