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24 pages, 321 KB

Open AccessArticle

Messaging Dissent: WhatsApp as Alternative Media in Times of Protest—The Case of “Tikva”

by Carmit Wiesslitz

Soc. Sci. 2026, 15(6), 396; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci15060396 - 18 Jun 2026

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This article examines the utilization of WhatsApp as an alternative communication tool for disseminating visual content among social activists during protests. While WhatsApp is typically conceptualized as an interpersonal or group messaging platform, research on its role as an infrastructure for alternative media and citizen journalism remains limited. The study focuses on the “Tikva” group, established at the onset of the public struggle against the 2023 judicial reform in Israel, which evolved into a nine-month mass protest movement described as one of the largest in the country’s history. Through qualitative thematic content analysis of videos distributed within the group, the article explores how WhatsApp functions simultaneously as a channel for digital activism and as a site of bottom-up, democratic, non-institutional news production. The findings indicate two primary trends: functionally, WhatsApp operates as a mechanism for resource mobilization, calls to action in physical and digital spaces, and the cultivation of belonging and solidarity among activists facing institutional power; in terms of content and production, the videos articulate an anti-hegemonic discourse and challenge mainstream media conventions. The analysis shows how these videos dismantle delegitimizing frames and construct a counter-narrative depicting protesters as citizens defending democracy, thereby sustaining the protest movement’s momentum. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Technology, Digital Media and Politics)

49 pages, 2919 KB

Open AccessArticle

War of Narratives: Christianity, Iconoclasm, and Decoloniality of Race and Religion

by Shalini Kakar

Religions 2026, 17(2), 168; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel17020168 - 30 Jan 2026

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Abstract

This paper examines Christian icons in Panjab, in northern India, and their relationship to the larger discourse on race, iconoclasm, and decentering Whiteness in the United States. I analyze the appropriation of Panjabi idioms woven into Christian icons to interrogate the alleged case of forced conversions of lower caste, Mazhabi Sikhs, and the atmospheres of violence. Focusing on the beheading of Christ and Mary’s pieta statue in a church in Tarn Taran, Panjab in 2022, I investigate the iconic materiality and vexed histories of the religious symbol through a visual studies lens. How do Christian images signal liminal material presences that oscillate between their identity of sacred icons and of hegemonic monuments of white supremacy? Using a Lacanian psychoanalytic and decolonial framework, I argue that entangled in the politics of memory, Christian icons are an impregnated space of intersecting colonial histories of oppression and conversion entrenched in hierarchies of race, class, and caste. This study contributes to understanding the growing impact of Christianity in northern India, the war of narratives being enacted upon its icons, and its relationship to anti-colonial and anti-racial expressions of transnational iconoclasm to posit a bigger question: Is there a way to navigate through the dense matrix of colonialism, race, religion, caste, and violence to reclaim agency through Mignolo’s call for a “praxis of decolonial healing”? Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Race, Religion, and Nationalism in the 21st Century)

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15 pages, 312 KB

Open AccessArticle

Are We There Yet? Revisiting the Old and New Postcolonialism(s) in IR

by Shelby A. E. McPhee, Nathan Andrews and Maïka Sondarjee

Histories 2025, 5(4), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/histories5040054 - 24 Oct 2025

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Abstract

Postcolonialism stands as a synergy between new and old sets of literature that have come together unevenly and in different ways. Postcolonial interventions have contended with IR core themes over the past four decades. Over the last two decades, there has also been a boom in the scholarship that examines non-Western IR, with some emerging from the contributions of critical theorists who sought to question the dominance of mainstream perspectives such as (neo)realism, liberal institutionalism, and constructivism. How has postcolonialism influenced IR, and how does it relate to non-Western approaches of the ‘international’? This article presents a historical categorization of postcolonial interventions on world politics as postcolonial 1.0 (the anti-colonial struggles against empire); 2.0 (subaltern studies, discourse and Otherness); and 3.0 (disrupting hegemonic epistemes). It then provides a review of whether and how postcolonial approaches align with the movement towards a non-Western IR. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue History of International Relations)

17 pages, 223 KB

Open AccessArticle

“No Eden Without Its Serpent?”: Tracing Colonial Discourses in the Early Missionary Writings and the Development of Adventist Theological Education in Indonesia

by Ludwig Beethoven J. Noya

Religions 2025, 16(3), 276; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16030276 - 24 Feb 2025

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2086

Abstract

Through this article, I endeavor to foreground the topic of colonial education by focusing on how missionaries manifested a colonial mindset in the realm of theological education in Indonesia. This article begins by tracing the colonial discourses of the early missionaries through missionaries’ reports, newsletters, and other historical sources. It continues by delineating the colonial discourses in the development of the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) system of education. This survey shows how colonial discourses such as the discourse of othering, anti-conquest ideology, binary hierarchies, hegemonic mindsets, cultural imperialism, reproduction of workers, and a strict disciplinary system are present in the development of SDA theological education in Indonesia. Full article

16 pages, 265 KB

Open AccessArticle

Because You’re Worth It! The Medicalization and Moralization of Aesthetics in Aging Women

by Chiara Pussetti

Societies 2021, 11(3), 97; https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11030097 - 12 Aug 2021

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 10327

Abstract

In this article—based on the fieldwork I conducted in Lisbon (Portugal) between 2018 and 2021, employing in-depth ethnography and self-ethnography—I describe the experience of the medicalization and moralization of beauty in Portuguese women aged 45–65 years. I examine the ways in which practitioners inscribe their expert knowledge on their patients’ bodies, stigmatizing the marks of time and proposing medical treatments and surgeries to “repair” and “correct” them. Beauty and youth are symbolically constructed in medical discourse as visual markers of health, an adequate lifestyle, a strong character and good personal choices (such as not smoking, and a healthy diet and exercise habits). What beauty means within the discourse of anti-aging and therapeutic rejuvenation is increasingly connected to an ideal gender performance of normative, white, middle-class, heterosexual femininity that dismisses structural determinants. The fantasy of eternal youth, linked to a neoliberal ideology of limitless enhancement and individual responsibility, is firmly entrenched in moralizing definitions of aesthetics and gender norms. Finally, my article highlights the ways in which the women I interviewed do not always passively accept the discourse of the devaluation of the ageing body, defining femininity and ageing in their own terms by creating personal variants of the hegemonic normative discourses on beauty and successful ageing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Old and New Actors and Phenomena in the Three-M Processes of Life and Society: Medicalization, Moralization and Misinformation)

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