Publication details
Organizing spontaneous grammars in hegemony-building of right-wing populism, and religious legitimization of autonomy in debates about social inequality
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This paper will present the provisional results of a wide-ranging discursive analysis of elite political and religious figures, parties, think tanks, congregations, and initiatives mainly affiliated with dominant Christian traditions, in the case of two nation-state contexts, the United States and Poland. My research endeavor sought to embed the organization of social categories and identities under study, representing cultural and economic intersections of social inequality, in the global context of transformations of social formations, which are characterized by the disorganization and disarticulation of collective demands reinventing the power competition in fluctuating mass mobilization of emotive outreach as the new terrain of Gramscian hegemonic politics. This issue will be demonstrated in cases, where religious and political actors identify and advocate certain models within the public-private nexus to address social crises while interpreting the key concepts such as autonomy and security within political metaphors of ideological forms and through organizing, codifying, and legitimizing certain spontaneous grammars. The comparison of culturally distinct promissory imaginaries and abductive explanations of perceived social crises considering the country's institutional and material settings and focusing on religious legitimation or reinterpretation will enrich the thriving research field in two important ways. It will lend a necessary material dimension to the discursive struggle over the conceptualization of autonomy, which has been explored in previous years mostly in the surface cultural features of referential social issues in scholarship on the well-known term culture wars. Focusing on the forming heterogeneous webs of interdependencies between the political, domestic economic, and religious interest groups and the intertwining economic and cultural autonomy within more or less coherent convergences of meaning patterns can give insight into the process of creating a complex mosaic of ideological forms that mediate basic socio-economic realities in both societies. Following the elucidation of these developments, the paper will attempt to move beyond the hitherto mostly formalist understandings of right-wing populism, with a specific focus on the interplay between institutionalized discourse, and the discursive practices through which they attain political salience and popular appeal, assessing the consequentiality of ideological project. Additionally, the presentation will also briefly touch upon how the engagement of dominant religious traditions within these contexts in arising right-wing populist hegemonic figurations, providing strong legitimization resources, and shaping the social constructions, impact the religious milieu in these countries. Observed fragmentations of religious communities and the rise of new authorities that play an irreplaceable role in the novel scheme of power can therefore help assess the paradoxical situation of weakening official religious institutions and reconstruction of the religious component in overall cultural and institutional formations. |
| Related projects: |