Introduction: Tricksters, humour and activism

This special issue, entitled ‘The Trickster Activist in Global Humour and Comedy’, investigates the relevance of the concept of the trickster for explaining activist expressions that emanate from comedians, or that appear in comedy and humour more generally. Comedy has traditionally been viewed as an aesthetic or entertainment medium. It has often been charged with encouraging stereotype and the affirmation of mainstream audience beliefs. Despite this, we argue, there have been moments in recent history where comedians have given their performances an increased level of social and political consciousness that resonates with the public at large, or with sections of the public. Comedians, we argue, are able to reach this level of social commentary due to their potential to become tricksters. Paradoxically, the mythical trickster is a liminal entity, one that is adept at destruction as well as creation, or at conservativism as well radicalism. The articles in this issue explore the complexity of the trickster concept, showing some of the polysemy involved in the social activism enabled by comedy and humour

Gadflies biting science communication: engagement, tricksters and ambivalence online

Large-scale online science communication and engagement projects can assume an overly ordered and sterile type of online public space or civil society. Against this, the paper offers a vision of more carnivalesque spaces for online science communication and engagement. Participants in these spaces taking the role of tricksters disrupting the status quo might offer new opportunities for engagement, play and politics online: the online public sphere for discussing science is broken, and we should look for ways to break it better. Acknowledging the limitations of a trickster-like approach, we also consider the ambivalence inherent in carnivalesque play as engagement practice.We are grateful for the helpful comments on this paper from Linda Billings, Sarah Rachael Davies, and Susanna Priest. Simon Weaver helped us with our work on tricksters. We have benefited from valuable feedback on a previous version of this paper received from participants at a University of Copenhagen event on STS approaches to science communication (particularly Felicity Mellor's detailed comments) and when presenting it to Dundee University's Society Research Group; Data & Society Research Institute's Databite No. 99 event helped inspire our discussion of ambivalence. Mendel benefited from Dundee University School of Social Sciences Research Committee funding, which assisted with some travel. We are particularly grateful to the badscience bloggers who participated in work related to this, and discussed this related work with us

Youth work, agonistic democracy and transgressive enjoyment in England

Concerns abound in media and political commentary regarding the purported political apathy of youth. This chapter shares the narratives of active engagement with politics on the part of a number of young people, as part of their efforts to resist the threats to youth services posed by the discourses and practices of neoliberal austerity. The analysis in the chapter links the young people’s engagement to the tenets of agonistic models of democracy, namely pluralism, contestation and tragedy. The chapter concludes with consideration of the implications of participants’ narrated experiences for the study of politics and political engagement in coming years

Jungian screen studies: ‘Everything is awesome’…?

Jungian film theory has reached a point where it has started to coalesce into a field. It is perhaps timely to take stock of what constitutes that field, and the extent to which a Jungian orientation to film and media is differentiated from Freudian and Lacanian approaches as well as those derived from traditional phenomenology and Deleuze