Search Results (31)

Climate change disinformation has emerged as a substantial issue in the internet age, affecting public perceptions, policy response, and climate actions. This study, grounded on the theoretical frameworks of social epistemology, Habermas’s theory of communicative action, post-truth, and Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge, examines the effect of digital infrastructures, ideological forces, and epistemic power dynamics on climate change disinformation. The meta-synthesis approach in the study reveals the mechanics of climate change disinformation on social media, the erosion of epistemic welfare influenced by post-truth dynamics, and the ideological and algorithmic amplification of disinformation, shedding light on climate change misinformation as well. The findings show that climate change disinformation represents not only a collection of false claims but also a broader epistemic issue sustained by digital environments, power structures, and fossil corporations. Right-wing populist movements, corporate interests, and algorithmic recommendation systems substantially enhance climate skepticism, intensifying political differences and public distrust in scientific authority. The study highlights the necessity of addressing climate change disinformation through improved scientific communication, algorithmic openness, and digital literacy initiatives. Resolving this conundrum requires systemic activities that go beyond fact-checking, emphasizing epistemic justice and legal reforms. Full article

This article examines the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy politics in Western societies through the lens of status, honor, and dignity. By focusing on the political appeal of leaders like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, and others, this study argues that these leaders resonate with primarily white, male supporters who feel that their social status and cultural identity are under threat. Drawing on works by Isabel Wilkerson, Ashley Jardina, and Arlie Hochschild, this analysis highlights how anxieties surrounding demographic shifts, perceived “status loss”, and narratives of cultural displacement fuel support for authoritarian policies. It posits that contemporary right-wing movements in the US, Europe, and Latin America are less about economic grievances and more about defending a social hierarchy in which white identity is paramount. This pursuit, while objectively not the same, still mirrors struggles among historically marginalized communities, as discussed by scholars like Bhimrao Ambedkar and Gopal Guru, challenging traditional rational-choice models of political behavior. Relying on an auto-ethnographic account obtained from living in one of the US’s most conservative regions, the West Texas plains, this study suggests that authoritarianism’s appeal lies in its promise to restore a social order steeped in white male dominance, showing how feelings of honor and pride can override democratic principles and fuel political polarization. Ultimately, this article cautions that a social science approach relying solely on rational actor models risks overlooking the potent influence of status anxieties in shaping modern political landscapes, with significant implications for democracy and justice. Full article

In spring 2023, controversy arose over Spring Fever, an annual campaign to promote sexual and relationship education in primary schools in The Netherlands. This led to parliamentary questions and even death threats against employees of Rutgers, The Netherlands Center on Sexuality, which developed the program. This article examines how child sexuality was framed both in the Spring Fever project and in the resulting controversy. The analysis is based on newspaper articles from March to June 2023. One premise of Spring Fever is that children are seen as sexual agents able to develop their sexuality safely through age-appropriate education, which aims for children’s healthy development, including negotiating consent and experiencing pleasure. During the 2023 controversy, discourses of childhood innocence emerged in response to this, alongside accusations of focusing too much on “woke” themes, such as gender diversity. This paper concludes that, due to global anti-gender movements and local right-wing politics, the Dutch model of sex education—pragmatic, comprehensive, and evidence-based, as seen in Spring Fever—no longer maintains its depoliticizing effect. Additionally, the Spring Fever controversy signals a shift in the politics of sexual nationalism in The Netherlands. Full article

The endorsement from Christian circles in facilitating the rise of radical right-wing populism in Brazil and the United States, as well as the support and alliance of the Polish Catholic Church with the Law and Justice (PiS) government, are widely acknowledged. Embedded within the intricate fabric of multifaceted factors contributing to the surge of right-wing populism, the Culture War assumes a pivotal yet often underestimated role. Manifesting as a profound confrontation, the Culture War signifies an existential clash between contrasting perspectives concerning socio-cultural values grounded in religious scripture. The research employs a qualitative methodology and a singular case study focused on Portugal, owing to the nation’s enduring relationship with Catholicism. Portugal emerges as indisputably one of the most religious countries in the Western world, akin to Poland. The research question aims to understand the support or relationship from the Portuguese Catholic Church (PCC) and Christian (social) movements to the populist right-wing Chega (lit. ‘Enough!’), slightly departing from their traditional center-right support for PSD and CDS in the Culture War. The results show that the support extended to Chega by the PCC and the Portuguese Episcopal Conference is non-existent in a formal manner. Despite this fact and the lack of formal backing for Chega, some Christian social movements have shown their approval or support for Chega, as the party has some roots in the movement sector, but not as strongly as the Front Nationale. Further research is suggested in order to attain deeper conclusions from both the Portuguese Catholic Church and Christian social movements using other methods for a deeper understanding, such as semi-structured interviews and participant observation of events. Full article

Repetitive movements and the speed of upper limbs increase the risk of musculoskeletal disorders. This study aimed to analyse the risk of shoulder injuries in repetitive tasks by evaluating the humerus angle, angular velocity, and angular acceleration during simulated chicken wing cutting. The study was conducted in a laboratory simulating a real environment. Thirty-six healthy right-handed volunteers were assessed using an electromagnetic tracking device, TrakSTAR, integrated with MotionMonitor™ (Innovative Sports Training, Inc. Chicago, IL) and software to collect 3-D kinematic data developed in the research centre. The equipment measured the angles performed by the upper limbs during the entire movement. The humerus angles were automatically transformed into angular velocity (°·s⁻¹) and angular acceleration (°·s⁻²). Maximum angular velocities were 27.39°·s⁻¹ (men, right humerus) and 22.39°·s⁻¹ (women, left humerus), both below the safe limit. Maximum accelerations were 25.32°·s⁻² (men, left side) and 28.94°·s⁻² (women, left side); safety values for these accelerations are not established. Monotony is a risk factor, especially for the dominant side. Future studies should evaluate risk factors simultaneously in repetitive tasks. Repetitiveness exceeds the safe limit according to the OCRA method. Full article

Analyzing data from a survey of U.S. adults (N = 509), our study examines the role of partisan media in (a) shaping people’s perceptions of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, (b) producing an echo-chamber effect, influencing users to believe that other people have an opinion similar to their own, and (c) creating a polarized public opinion environment, where people hold more extreme perspectives on BLM. Left-wing media consumption was positively correlated with favorable perceptions of BLM, while right-wing media consumption had a negative correlation, suggesting that partisan media could influence users’ own perceptions of BLM. Also, left-wing media consumption was positively correlated with the belief that others held favorable views of BLM, while right-wing media consumption was negatively correlated with such a belief, suggesting that partisan media could affect one’s beliefs about others’ perceptions. Supporting its role in producing an echo-chamber effect, frequent right-wing media usage was associated with a smaller difference between one’s own views and their assessment of others’ views regarding BLM. Finally, there was a positive correlation between left-wing media consumption and having extreme perceptions of BLM, suggesting that the use of left-wing media could play a role in creating a polarized public opinion climate. Full article

This paper analyzes the processes of racialization in Portuguese right-wing political movements through two prominent nationalist fanpages. It employs a mixed-methods approach that includes both quantitative and qualitative official data. The sample covers 72 months, from January 2017 to December 2020, encompassing a total of 3670 posts on Facebook. The main findings reveal that the fanpages utilize different discursive strategies, sometimes focusing on publishing static images and other times on sharing news links. From these publications, the fanpages garnered more than 1.4 million interactions, demonstrating consistent growth in their follower bases over the years. Emotional responses played a significant role in the interactions, particularly with Love, Sad, and Angry reactions standing out. The results also reveal that Portuguese nationalism maintains a dual ideology concerning race: ethno-exclusivism and ethno-pluralism. This observation affirms the dual nature of nationalist fanpages, where narrative elements converge and diverge based on the intended goal. Thus, individuals from Africa and Afro-descendants can be portrayed as both national heroes and social scum. Full article

This article explores the sources of Islamic knowledge among young Muslim activists in Bima, Eastern Indonesia, who are often stereotyped as a hotbed of radicalism, and their religious types to reveal their intellectual dynamics. This article argues that, in modern times, as Islamic tendencies and orientations have diversified, young Muslims in the Bima region engage with many different aspects of the production and use of religious knowledge under the umbrella of Indonesian Islam. Moreover, they actively build peer-group-based intellectualism, fostering patron–client connections in the form of discussion and literacy development through student organizations, and this is influential in shaping their religious identities and religious types. This qualitative research involved 47 young Muslim activists, who are also senior high school and university students, 20 of whom were interviewed in-depth, while 27 others participated in focus group discussions. This research reveals that their sources of learning vary. However, the most critical media in shaping and confirming their religious understanding are the training and discussions held by their respective peer groups and organizations. Their literacy and references are also further developed through these forums. Learning resources accessed via social media are considered essential but unreliable in this digital era. Therefore, in their intellectual development, young persons need teachers and families to act as learning resource providers that co-exist with the literacy obtained through organizations. Such sources and ways of learning form a type of religiosity that is “practical” (embodied in daily practice) for most. Meanwhile, the “ideological” type of religion (fundamental to the Islamization movement) is only found in right-wing activists of Islamic organizations and does not thrive among the young people of Bima, Eastern Indonesia. Full article

This article examines the revitalization of the ancient Greek religion in modern Greece and the way some of its adherents approach mythology. This religious movement challenges the dominant religious discourse in modern Greece by claiming legitimacy through indigeneity, while making important arguments regarding the perceived spiritual and value crisis in their culture. At a time that right-wing extremisms and fundamentalisms are rising globally, this religious movement places emphasis on worldview and imagines a kind of citizen who engages with universal ideals while maintaining a strong connection to a unique ethnic identity. At the same time, Ethnikoi Hellenes challenge prevailing understandings of religion by making ‘logos’ or reason central to their theology. Thus, they challenge the association of Indigenous religions with “irrationality”, while pointing out the inconsistencies and irrationalities of monotheistic religions, which they consider responsible for the widespread “cultural” crisis facing humanity. The example of one group’s engagement with geomythology has been used to demonstrate that they do not conceive religion and science as contradictory but complementary, thus exhibiting transreligiosity. Full article

This paper offers insights into the nexus of youth, masculinity, and right-wing populism in Australia. Here, we make reference to a wide body of international literature that suggests some affinity between disenfranchised (white) working-class young men and radical right ideas. Survey data were collected for a project on masculinity and the far right in Australia. A total of 203 young male informants worked primarily in ‘blue collar’ sectors of the Australian labour force. Some survey responses located them partly or potentially within the field of the populist right-wing, with many expressing anti-government sentiments and the discourse of white male victimhood. The majority were nostalgic for stereotypical masculinity. While right-wing populist movements across the world certainly differ, they often share a discourse promoting traditional gender roles. Full article

This article tests the salience of the concept of “civilizational populism” in the European and North American contexts. Right-wing populism is increasingly successful across a range of countries in Europe and North America. While right-wing populism is oriented toward nationalism and nativism, many right-wing populist parties increasingly perceive, as Brubaker puts it, the “opposition between self and other” and “the boundaries of belonging” not in narrow “national but in broader civilizational terms”. Yilmaz and Morieson describe this phenomenon as “civilizational populism”. Using Cas Mudde’s ideological/ideational definition of populism, Yilmaz and Morieson describe civilizational populism as “a group of ideas that together considers that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people, and society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’ who collaborate with the dangerous others belonging to other civilizations that are hostile and present a clear and present danger to the civilization and way of life of the pure people”. Civilizational populism appears to be widespread across Europe, and it is also present in the United States, although there is curiously little research on this phenomenon, and Yilmaz and Morieson’s conception of civilizational populism has not been extensively tested. To test the salience of this concept, this article examines three distinct manifestations of civilizational rhetoric in three different countries: the Trump administration in the United States, National Rally in France, and PiS in Poland. The article asks the following two questions. What role does civilizationalism play in populist discourses? How do the civilizational populists in France, Poland, and the United States define “the people”, “elites”, and “others”, and what are the similarities and differences between the parties/movements examined? The article finds that all three parties/movements may be termed “civilizational populists” under the definition given by Yilmaz and Morieson. It finds that the civilizational populists examined in the article posit that “elites” are immoral insofar as they have both turned away from the “good” religion-derived cultural values of “the people” and permitted or desired the immigration of people who do not share the culture and values as “the people”, instead belonging to a foreign civilization—Islam—with different and even antithetical values. However, the article finds that “the people”, “elites”, and “others” are described by Trump, Le Pen, and Kaczyński in significantly different ways. Full article

Between 1937 and 1945, numerous American journalists became gravely concerned about a rapidly growing Mexican Catholic right-wing movement, the Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS). Founded in 1937, the UNS spread rapidly across Mexico and by 1941, the Sinarquistas had formed numerous chapters in the United States as well. This coincided with the U.S. entry into World War II, and a heightened concern about the potential threat represented by immigrants loyal to Axis powers. Thus, U.S. journalists devoted significant coverage to the Sinarquista movement, casting it as a Fifth Column movement that was taking money, arms, and direct orders from enemies of the United States. In doing so, journalists largely downplayed the inherently Catholic character of the movement, as well as its deep roots in Mexican Church-state history, interpreting it instead within the framework of contemporary geopolitics. As a result, U.S. media consumers received an incomplete portrait of this particular religious “other”. In this article, I focus on the writings of the journalists Allan Chase and Betty Kirk, in order to assess how and why religion and religious belief was de-emphasized in influential media portrayals of the UNS, and why this matters for historians and journalists interested in religious movements. Full article

Some contemporary social phenomena, despite secularization, are still linked to religion. However, this same secularization seems to have accompanied a progressive process of religious illiteracy. Therefore, the capacity to address religious inspired issues is lower than the magnitude of the problems at work, be violent right-wing movement and Islamist terrorism or ethical debates on the beginning and end of life, to name but a few. Hence, this paper aims to fulfil three goals: to revisit secularism and some liberal assumptions that might prevent a correct understanding of these phenomena, to assess some of the consequences of the critique of ideologies and to propose an alternative approach to address religious inspired social phenomena. Full article

During the Korean War, conflicts between right-wing Protestants and radical socialists escalated and erupted into massacres, killing thousands of Korean civilians. Such extreme violence and tumultuous events afterwards—including Korea’s division into two separate states and the Cold War system—eclipsed the imbricated interactions between Protestant Christianity and socialism under Japanese colonial rule. While focusing on Korean Protestantism and socialism to probe their contest and compromise for survival, this article traces the tripartite relationship among the followers of Protestant Christianity, Marxist socialism, and Japanese imperialism as it evolved throughout colonial Korea between 1910 and 1945. These 35 years comprised a period of multiple possibilities for interaction among Korean Protestants, socialists, and Japanese authorities in the changing global environment. The international organizations with which they were associated influenced Korean Protestants and Marxist socialists while facing the common crisis of Japan’s assimilation. Namely, the Korean Protestant churches affiliated with Western missionaries’ denomination headquarters in their home countries and world Christian conferences, while the Korean socialists allied with Moscow’s Comintern and other radical political movements abroad. Within this broader context, these two religious and ideological forces competed for supremacy, cooperated in a joint struggle against the colonial regime, and antagonized each other over their divergent worldviews. By examining their complicated tripartite relationship, this essay comprehensively depicts the dynamic history of the Western-derived religious and political doctrines meeting a non-Western empire in a foreign land. Full article

For decades, the world’s dominant ideological and policy framework, neoliberal globalization, increasingly faces important disrupters. Long backers of neoliberalism, conservative movements now face pressing, convergent policy challenges (climate emergency, COVID-19), which they increasingly deny through populism, rather than address through neoliberalism. Populism’s unstable, often localist or xenophobic spatial imaginaries increasingly disrupt the neoliberal globalizing consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and, thus, continental and international integration. As challenges mount, neoliberal globalization’s chances of re-stabilization diminish. However, chance, strategy, and the collective determination and capacities of its opponents will also be essential to establish something new. This article is an interpretive work, linking these themes to the history and current debates of Alberta, Canada, and its unconventional fossil-fuel exports. Canada’s leading fossil-fuel jurisdiction, Alberta, has stoutly favored free trade, continental integration, federal decentralization, and new export markets. Its United Conservative Party (UCP) government exhibits neo-nationalist or regionalist populism, opening tensions with the continental integration of its fossil fuel industries. Yet its populism targets the industry’s enemies to accelerate industry’s growth. Right-wing populism, marked by unstable spatial imaginaries, marks Alberta’s history. Alberta exemplifies the current destabilization of neoliberal globalization through populism, with implications for fossil-fuel exports. Full article