XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

71

Populism and Community Research

RC03 Community Research (host committee)

Language: English

Populism is on the rise, left and right. It describes phenomena as varied as the Syriza and Podemos movements in crisis-ridden Southern Europe, the pro-Brexit campaign in the UK, and the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump in the United States. Following Peter Worsley, populism is defined as the articulation of any contents within the logic of resentment or indignation, a political rhetoric that pits the (virtuous) many against the (corrupted) few. Populism hence defined challenges our communities in different ways.

On the one hand, populist leaders often pit the hard-working, simple “people” against the “other people”, including immigrants and refugees. This endangers the solidarity between strangers that is central to culturally diverse communities. On the other hand, populism, from the Russian narodnichestvo to the American Populists of the nineteenth-century, can also be seen as reinforcing the sense of identification of the members of local communities against the anomic tendencies of advanced industrial societies.

This session welcomes papers that explore these dynamics and processes. Preference will be given to broader comparative or thematic studies. In particular, we welcome contributions that study the “performation” of contents such as ideology, strategy or mode of organization, discourse, political communication style, claim-making, or social emotions in order to examine the impact of populist politics upon communities. Papers with a more explicit theoretical focus are also welcome.