Publication: Culture Machine Vol. 19 (Media and Populism)

Culture Machine is an open access journal of culture and theory, and a member of the Radical Open Access Collective.

Visit here: https://culturemachine.net/archives/vol-19-media-populism/

Below is an excerpt of Media Populism's Editorial Introduction:

"Parasitical, unstable, excessive, corrupt, inexact, threatening—the intellectual history of populism is, to say the least, vexed. 'Few terms have been so widely used in contemporary political analysis', Ernesto Laclau famously observed, and 'few have been defined with less precision' (1977: 143). As populism has increasingly become 'the preserve of political scientists' (Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017: 10; Canovan, 1982), so too has its focus on political parties and movements become a default position in academic and popular thought. This orientation, today contested by many political scientists but nonetheless widespread, has the advantage of making populism visible, even measurable, through its analysis of speeches, polls, rallies, and electoral victories. At the same time, the narrow focus on parties and movements has created conceptual and epistemological barriers that continue to impede the emergence of new perspectives—on, for instance, the relationship between media and populism—that fall outside of political scientific frameworks, confirming Chantal Mouffe's (2005) assertion that political theory alone is not equipped to answer populism's contemporary challenges, even at an analytical level. Apart from the difficulty of disembodying populism from parties and movements, this approach remains closely allied to rational-choice assumptions, failing to embrace the many affective and infrastructural dimensions that are constitutive of the political sphere. Overcoming these limitations has been, and still is, a major challenge to the study of populism. Responding to Culture Machine's call to open up cultural and theoretical research beyond established paradigms, this special issue brings problems of media and mediation to bear on populist phenomena and debates.