By Ari Häkkinen and Sirpa LeppänenIntroductionBy 2013, it has become obvious that social media is an ever more important factor in various walks of life. Political protests, citizen empowerment, and a...

In this working paper, I introduce the notion of digital voice as a heuristic to examine the interplay between digital discourse and the infrastructural power of digital platforms, and more specifical...

The windmill as a sociocultural artifactPeople live and have lived together all over the world. The different communities are constantly shaped by space and time, and these features define our meaning...

By Miguel Pérez-Milans and Adriana Patiño-SantosIntroductionIn the spring of 2010 we were invited to have a look at the data collected by a research team coordinated by Luisa Martín-Rojo in Madrid (Sp...

We have arrived at an age in which AI art is present in our everyday lives. In the last few months of 2025, at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings. These fig...

The current political era within the United States is characterized by constantly reinforced appeals to pride. Symptomatic is the White House-website, where you are bombarded with calls to save Americ...

By Jan BlommaertPreface: what linguists have made of itMost standard textbooks and historical accounts state that linguistics as a modern science started with the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’...

Fame can feel like a dream come true, but for some, it becomes a trap. Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism (2011) explains how people hold on to hopes or ideals that actually end up hurting the...

The study of metapolitics in this essay entails the study of the right-wing project to establish a hegemonic ideology. While the far-right sees international cultural and electoral success, the left i...

By Zane GoebelIntroductionEthnicity is now a ubiquitous social category in Indonesia, which is typically made up of a combination of person, place, and linguistic form. While we now have a good pictur...

The world is rapidly changing. New technologies promise to fix everything from the climate crisis to geopolitical threats, but they often have unexpected effects on communities, culture, and material ...

Women in their 20s have a lot to figure out, and in the digital age they often turn to platforms such as TikTok to search for answers. For me too, social media is a place that I feel like I can turn t...

Mithu Sanyal is a German writer, journalist, and cultural scholar and the author of, among other works, the novels Identitti (2021) and Antichristie (2024). In July 2026, Anna-Lena Eick and Inge van d...

IntroductionIn December 2024, a mass of comments appeared on a video Young Adult (YA) author Victoria Aveyard posted to her TikTok page. The comments alleged that with her YA novel Red Queen, Aveyard ...

Huber's new book, Irish Ecomedia: Empire and Environmental Justice in the Modernization of Postcolonial Ireland, examines changing technologies and media landscapes in the history of modernization in ...

Introducing Jeremy Corbyn and Your PartyJeremy Corbyn is a 76 years old British social democratic politician, formerly leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. In July 2025, together with Zarah S...

What do Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, the French Open, Taylor Swift’s song ‘this is me trying’, a Donald Trump meme, being a girl’s girl, and the TV adaptation of The Summer I Turned Pretty ...

The Netherlands has a rich industrial history, which is partially reflected by the many former factory sites that still exist today. While these industrial sites once played a crucial role in producti...

Knowledge has never been more accessible than it is today. The phrase “to Google it” has become a universal expression when searching for information online. One of the most influential websites in th...

Ireland in the 2020s is haunted by the memories of a crisis that no longer dominates headlines but continues to shape everyday life. The aftermath of the Celtic Tiger collapse lingers as a kind of nat...

Your ai slop bores me (youraislopbores.me) is a website designed by programmer Mihir Maroju that was launched on March 2, 2026. The project, often shortened to "YASBM", was designed to be a parody of ...

By Zane Goebel and Nicholas HerrimanIntroductionSocio-cultural anthropology is often conceived of as the study of big themes in little places. It is thus not surprising that when anthropologists have ...

Coming across the photograph The Bare-chested Man in Front of the Occupiers’ Tank captured by Ladislav Bielik from the year 1968 is an eye opening experience, not only for its visual effect on the vie...

In a world where marginalized voices are too often sidelined, poetry offers a powerful bridge between private identity formation and public engagement. As a form of self-expression, poetry does more t...

By Zane GoebelIntroductionThis paper engages with discussions around public and private, represented talk, and conviviality. While all three areas have received considerable scholarly attention in the...

Jeremy Corbyn utilises tweets as deliberate de-naturalising interventions that challenge neoliberal 'common sense'. He does so by framing inequality and poverty as structural outcomes of a 'rigged' ne...

Michele Horrigan's commitment and connection to the region give her unique insights into the local natural and cultural heritage and their histories. In the latest episode of Living Culture, Making He...

Life often feels like a symphony of highs and lows, moments in which everything aligns perfectly or times when the world’s weight feels unbearable. In these emotional crescendos, we often reach for mu...

When “Never Again” becomes a political weaponIn June 2025, Dutch singer Douwe Bob was invited to perform at the Jom Ha Voetbaltoernooi, a Jewish football tournament for children in Amsterdam. When he ...

By David Parkin, Karel Arnaut and Roxy HarrisAbstractHow can language practices in multiethnic, multilingual urban contexts in Africa, and contemporary perspectives on urban language and superdiversit...

In BoJack Horseman, the 2014 Netflix show that ran until 2020, moments of intimate suffering are never allowed to remain private. Addiction and trauma are immediately transformed into media narratives...

Ideology has no history… it is lived, not thought, and it structures the very reality in which individuals live their everyday lives. (Althusser, 1970)IntroductionIt is difficult to imagine a worse in...

By Ruth MensaertIntroductionThere is a growing sense that over the past two decades, globalization has changed the face of social, cultural and linguistic diversity in societies all over the world (Bl...

J.K. Rowling: From Famous Author to Popular TERFJ.K. Rowling, born Joanne Rowling, is a 60-year-old Scottish author, most known for her Harry Potter series (Rowling, n.d.). This seven-book-long fantas...

The proliferation of technology, and the digital platform economy as its recent form, it is argued, has rendered individuals autonomous. We take the concept of 'autonomy' as our starting point to cons...

By Jan BlommaertIntroductionLanguage is one of the most immediate and sensitive indexes of diversity. Small differences in accent and speaking patterns betray someone’s regional, social class, ethnic ...

In February 2024, OpenAI launched the first version of Sora: an AI platform where people could generate photos and videos of whatever they want within seconds. It has now been downloaded over three mi...

Focussing on ‘the everyday’ gives us valuable insights into how AI shapes routine interactions in sites of work, leisure, education, and homes. It shows us the pervasiveness of AI-technologies and the...

By Xuan Wang, Massimiliano Spotti, Kasper Juffermans, Leonie Cornips, Sjaak Kroon and Jan BlommaertIntroductionThis paper will discuss sociolinguistic globalization phenomena in ‘marginal’ environment...

In recent years, heritage practices across Europe are being looked at more critically as people try to come to terms with their colonial history. In the Netherlands, this awareness has become visible ...

Who is Zohran Mamdani?Zohran Kwame Mamdani is a 34-year-old American politician and a proud democratic socialist. On November 5th, 2025, he won the elections with 50.4 % of the votes and from January ...

By Zane GoebelAbstractIn recent years the study of the relationship between talk and the doing of leadership has gained increasing attention from linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists. Even so...

As Maly and Beekmans (2025) argue, digital platforms are not merely neutral tools for distributing ideas; rather, they function as ideological infrastructures in their own right. The design, interface...

In 2021, The Watermelon Woman (1996) was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. As ...

By Zane GoebelAbstractEthnicity is now a ubiquitous social category in Indonesia which typically points to a community living in a particular region of Indonesia who speaks a particular language. Even...

In early September 2025, a new Banksy mural appeared on the exterior wall of the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. The image showed a judge in traditional wig and gown raising a gavel over a ...

Geert Wilders: a longtime actor in politicsGeert Wilders has been a long-standing figure in Dutch politics. He has served in the House of Representatives since 1998, initially as a member of the Peopl...

By Kristel PetersIntroduction: Investigating narrative and voice in the transition classThis thesis engages with ethnographically investigated issues of narrative and voice in a transition class in th...

Coachella is considered to be one of the most extravagant and glamorous music and arts events of the year. Every April, Coachella is at the forefront of social media discourse. What sets Coachella apa...