Cultural Consumption Through the Epistemologies of the South: 'Humanization' in Transnational Football Fan Solidarities

In 2014, Boaventura de Sousa Santos awoke the global sociological community to the need to privilege ‘humanization’ in the exploration of transnational solidarities. This article presents the cultural consumption of a football club – Liverpool FC – to understand the common ‘love’, ‘suffering’, ‘care’ and ‘knowledge’ that fans who are part of the ‘Brazil Reds’ or ‘Switzerland Reds’ (although not all fans engaged in such communities are ‘from’ Brazil or Switzerland) experience. The argument is that the global North lexicon of social class, ethnicity, gender and, especially, nationality is less significant as starting points for analysis than humanization through shared love, which consolidates Liverpool FC fans’ transnational solidarities. Accordingly, the article calls for the epistemologies of the global South to be used to understand the practices of cultural consumption that constitute activities in the sphere of everyday life, such as those involved in ‘love’ for a football club

Ins and outs of the cultural polis: informality, culture and governance in the global South

This paper provides an epistemological critique of informality by focusing on cultural governance in two cities of the global South, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Dakar, Senegal. Aiming to enrich debates about urban creativity and urban cultural policy, which are still mainly focused on and articulated from the global North, we consider the broad field of ‘informality’ research as an entry point for such a discussion. Using case studies from African and Latin American contexts, we focus on the interstices of cultural policy and the borderlands of (in)formality, examining how governmental institutions are entangled in informal processes, and how grassroots cultural interventions become part of mainstream cultural circuits. The analysis sheds light on how these creative spaces of cultural production, located in Southern contexts of urban extremes, contribute to the vitality of informal urbanisms and unsettle predominant views that see them merely as sites ofinfrastructural poverty and social exclusion. The paper suggests that a creative remapping of informality, through an inquiry of the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of the cultural polis, could improve our translating capacity of academic discourse into institutional/policy-related operations

Communications and Transport: The mobility of information, people and commodities

In a context where the study of communications tends to focus only on the mobility of information, to the neglect of that of people and commodities, this article explores the potential for a closer integration between the fields of communications and transport studies. Against the presumption that the emergence of virtuality means that material geographies are no longer of consequence, the role of mediated ‘technologies of distance’ is considered here in the broader contexts of the construction (and regulation) of a variety of physical forms of mobility and the changing modes of articulation of the virtual and material worlds

Cars, corporations, and commodities: Consequences for the social determinants of health

Social epidemiologists have drawn attention to health inequalities as avoidable and inequitable, encouraging thinking beyond proximal risk factors to the causes of the causes. However, key debates remain unresolved including the contribution of material and psychosocial pathways to health inequalities. Tools to operationalise social factors have not developed in tandem with conceptual frameworks, and research has often remained focused on the disadvantaged rather than on forces shaping population health across the distribution. Using the example of transport, we argue that closer attention to social processes (capital accumulation and motorisation) and social forms (commodity, corporation, and car) offers a way forward. Corporations tied to the car, primarily oil and vehicle manufacturers, are central to the world economy. Key drivers in establishing this hegemony are the threat of violence from motor vehicles and the creation of distance through the restructuring of place. Transport matters for epidemiology because the growth of mass car ownership is environmentally unsustainable and affects population health through a myriad of pathways. Starting from social forms and processes, rather than their embodiment as individual health outcomes and inequalities, makes visible connections between road traffic injuries, obesity, climate change, underdevelopment of oil producing countries, and the huge opportunity cost of the car economy. Methodological implications include a movement-based understanding of how place affects health and a process-orientated integration of material and psychosocial explanations that, while materially based, contests assumptions of automatic benefits from economic growth. Finally, we identify car and oil corporations as anti-health forces and suggest collaboration with them creates conflicts of interest

Narrative, memory and social representations: a conversation between history and social psychology

This paper explores relations between narrative, memory and social representations by examining how social representations express the ways in which communities deal with the historical past. Drawing on a case study of social representations of the Brazilian public sphere, it shows how a specific narrative of origins re-invents history as a useful mythological resource for defending identity, building inter-group solidarity and maintaining social cohesion. Produced by a time-travelling dialogue between multiple sources, this historical narrative is functional both to transform, to stabilise and give resilience to specific social representations of public life. The Brazilian case shows that historical narratives, which tend to be considered as part of the stable core of representational fields, are neither homogenous nor consensual but open polyphasic platforms for the construction of alternative, often contradictory, representations. These representations do not go away because they are ever changing and situated, recruit multiple ways of thinking and fulfil functions of identity, inter-group solidarity and social cohesion. In the disjunction between historiography and the past as social representation are the challenges and opportunities for the dialogue between historians and social psychologists