Giselinde Kuipers’s research while affiliated with KU Leuven and other places

In a post-truth context where environmental claims of scientists and politicians are increasingly contested, this article explores how satirical climate fiction facilitates the imagination of and engagement with climate change. Taking Don’t Look Up (2021) as a case study, it presents a thematic analysis of 640 Reddit contributions. The analysis reveals that the movie served as a meaningful text, decoded in various ways, and invited the audience to engage in online public environmental debate. In this ‘participatory culture of climate debate’, the movie became popular cultural capital for the readers to (1) environmentally inform each other, (2) share environmental critiques and (3) mobilize ecopolitical action. We theorize that it was exactly Don’t Look Up’s satirical ambiguity and humor, combined with its immersive fictitious nature, that made the text quintessentially participatory. Thus, we argue that the movie made an impact beyond the individual, fostering collective environmental imagination and awareness.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought about an unprecedented cycle of digitally spread humor. This article analyzes a corpus of 12,337 humor items from 80+ countries, mainly in visual format, and mostly memes, collected during the first half of 2020, to understand the features and intended audiences of this “pandemic humor”. Employing visual machine-learning techniques and additional qualitative analysis, we ask which actors and which templates were most prominent in the pandemic humor, and how these actors and templates vary on the following dimensions: local vs. global, Covid-specific vs. general, and specifically for the actors, political vs. not political. Our analysis shows that most pandemic memes from the first wave are not political. The vast majority of the memes are global: They are based on well-recognized meme templates, and almost all identified actors are part of a cast of set “meme faces”, mostly from the US and the UK but recognized around the world. Most popular templates were found in several countries and languages, including non-European languages. Most memes were based on non-Covid specific templates, but we found new Covid-specific memes, which sheds new light on the process by which memes emerge, spread, and potentially become new meme templates. Our analysis supplements existing studies of (Covid) memes that mostly focus on small national samples, using qualitative methods. This cross-national analysis is enabled by a global dataset with unique data on geographical origin of humor. We show the usefulness of visual machine learning for identifying the emergence, spread and prevalence of transnational (humorous) cultural forms. By combining large-scale computational analysis with in-depth analysis, we bridge a gap in in meme studies between (mostly quantitative) data sciences and (mostly qualitative) communication and media studies.

In this article, which serves as an introduction to a special issue on humor and the public sphere, we argue that humor has become increasingly central to public discourse in the 21st century, and that this necessitates a rethinking of the relationship between humor and the public sphere in contemporary democracies. In the article, we bring together the dispersed academic literature on humor and the public sphere, and show how humor and comedy scholars have engaged with the long-standing academic debate around this contested concept, which was coined by Jürgen Habermas in 1962. We also introduce the eleven contributions to this special issue and situate them within this ongoing debate.

What happens when politics enters strongly aesthetic cultural fields? This article proposes a novel conceptual framework, which we propose to call ideologization, to understand how political-ideological considerations influence cultural legitimation. We build on theories of legitimation and cultural intermediaries to examine the strategic case of fashion as a cultural production field at the intersection of aesthetics and economics. Combining an analysis of frames in fashion magazines since the 1980s with critical discourse analysis of British Vogue in turning-point year 2020, we theorize ideologization as consisting of three elements: aesthetic agenda-setting; the reimagination of relations between producers, consumers and intermediaries; and the generation of discursive contradictions. This process of ideologization, which we see across cultural fields since the late 2010s, has strong implications for intermediaries who act as framers and brokers of legitimate culture. We conclude by proposing future research to further develop the ideologization framework and detail the long-term impact of political-ideological logics on cultural fields.

How does television taste function as cultural capital in contemporary China? This study shows how Chinese youth engage with global television fiction to mark their positions in China’s changing social and cultural hierarchies. Using multiple correspondence analysis (N = 422) and interviews (N = 48) with college students in Beijing, we identify three taste dimensions: (1) disengaged versus discerning viewers; (2) TV lovers versus TV dislikers; and (3) ‘Western’ versus ‘Eastern’ TV taste. Dimensions 1 and 3 are cultural capital dimensions; they differ in criteria and type of cultural knowledge used to make distinctions and in connection with economic capital. Highlighting cosmopolitan capital as a distinct form of cultural capital, we analyse shifting global systems of cultural distinction, from a Chinese vantage point. Our analysis expands theories of culture and inequality by showing that (and how) tastes reflect and reinforce social stratification in the previously unexplored Chinese context, but with distinctive Chinese characteristics.

In contemporary societies, physical appearance is more important to more people than ever before. This article sketches the expansion of this contemporary beauty regime. Drawing mainly on European data, I argue that since the late 1800s the societal importance of appearance grew, as a result of expanding media and consumer cultures, social democratization, a shift to a service-based economy and the rise of new media. People came to have more developed and diverse tastes in human beauty and more opportunities to cultivate their appearance. It became more important to be beautiful, for men and women, across the course of life, in more domains of life. Drawing on the tradition of process sociology inspired by Weber and Elias, I interpret this gradual raising of cultural standards as the emergence of a beauty regime involving new standards for social control and self-control, standards for moral and aesthetic evaluation and standards for social worth and self-worth. The beauty regime is demanding and constraining for individuals but contributes to the emergence of durable social constellations that people might consider progress. The beauty regime makes appearance more central to many domains of life, and thus more consequential for identities and inequalities, self-worth and social worth.

Humour in the Beginning presents a multidisciplinary collection of fourteen in-depth case-studies on the role of humour – both benign and blasphemous, elitist and ordinary, orthodox and heterodox – in early, formative stages of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and (late-antique) Judaism. Its coherence is strengthened by four preceding theoretical essays, many cross-references and a conclusion. Thus, the volume allows for a methodologically sound comparison and explanation of historical views on humour in the world’s most important religions. At first sight, the foundational period of religions do not seem to offer much opportunities for humour. A closer look on primary sources, however, reveals the ways in which people formulated answers to existing ideas on humour and laughter, in moments of religious renewal. Main topics include the incongruous nature of the divine, the role of anthropomorphism, superior and didactic humour, moderate laughter, responses from dissenters and the gap between religious regulations and reality.

This article analyzes the creation of value in (semi-)peripheral fields, using interview (N=94) and ethnographic data of creatives, models and cultural intermediaries in Polish and Dutch fashion. Drawing on field theory and center-periphery theories we show that these peripheral fields have a distinct structure— peripheral worlds —marked by the dependence on foreign centers for goods, standards and consecration, in which actors employ field-specific peripheral strategies for pursuing value and success. Workers in the (semi-)periphery develop peripheral selves , marked by a “double consciousness”, simultaneously seeing themselves from a local perspective and through the eyes of “central” others. We theorize “peripheralness” as a dimension of social inequality, a continuum ranging from “most central” to “most peripheral”, that spring from transnational interdependencies; and offer building blocks for a theory of the periphery that connects structural conditions and personal experiences. This theory explains, among others, why peripheries are not the reverse of centers, why centers also need peripheries (though not as much as peripheries need centers), and why peripheral and semi-peripheral actors don’t leave for cultural hubs to “make it there”.