Justifying contentious social and political claims using mundane language: An analysis of Canadian right-wing extremism

Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
There has been a lack of research examining how right-wing extremist groups justify their key claims online to reach a broader audience. This question is even more worrisome when considering a Canadian context, given Canada’s state policies on multiculturalism and intolerance of hateful rhetoric. My research draws on the gaps within the literature of right-wing extremism, online spaces, and justification of discourse by conducting a content analysis of 300 Facebook and Twitter posts from the accounts of three Canadian right-wing extremist groups, ID Canada, Soldiers of Odin BC, and Yellow Vests Canada. This article proposes the use of French theorist Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critical capacity common worlds to help explain how right-wing extremist groups make arguments that are quite extreme to a broad audience of people on social media. Such claims include advocating for a homogenized Canadian identity and Canadian values, promoting a belief in social decay, and supporting authoritarianism. However, these claims are not overt; rather right-wing extremist groups discuss apolitical topics to mask controversial views.

LGBT+ ballroom dancers and their shoes: Fashioning the queer self into existence

Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
This article examines the role of dance shoes in LGBT+ ballroom dancers’ identity formation and expression on the dancefloor. Applying Entwistle’s (2015) ‘situated bodily practice’ to an analysis of ethnographic field notes and 35 interviews, I highlight that dancers’ performative constitution of subversive identities through reiterative mobilisation of the traditional symbolic values of dance shoes is influenced by the material. The article makes a key contribution to sociological knowledge on performativity through an introduction of materialities of place, bodies and artefacts into a close reading of reiterative acts. I argue that a closer look into performative acts is necessary for determining whether and how resistance is constituted, recognised and reproduced, taking into account how materialities interweave with discourse in order to give credit to subversive agents emerging in the micro-moments.

Voices of emergency: Imagined climate futures and forms of collective action

Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
Sociological debates on the mobilising force of imagined futures are particularly relevant in our present context of climate emergency, where the claim-making of a ‘threatened future’ has come to the fore in civic mobilisations worldwide. This article addresses these debates by empirically examining how adverse views of the future underpinning present thematisations of climate change as an emergency shape collective action. Based upon qualitative research conducted in Barcelona on new climate movements, I analyse the content and form of two imagined futures (‘catastrophe’ and ‘collapse’) that emerge from the ways in which participants of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future engage with the future and climate. This analysis shows how these imagined futures are reflected in individual imaginations and processed by these movements, infusing different forms of agency and impacting trajectories of action in the present. This empirically grounded focus on imagined climate futures reveals that not only are cognitions of climate risks crucial, but so are the emotions that these produce in configuring collective action. Likewise, this study highlights how even disastrous imagined climate futures include utopian impulses for sustainable futures as both a driver and result of collective action.