Whatshebuilding final

The Americas, 2018

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2019

This article formulates precise questions and 'rules of engagement' designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent 'the people', discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate 'elite'. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN). Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term 'populism' itself: how it is invoked, by whom, and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and 'populist hype', and reflect upon academia's own relation to populism and anti-populism.

What do we talk about when we talk about ‘populism’? However banal, overheated, and repetitive the question might seem, the quibble on the exact meaning of the ‘p-word’ persists. Most of the time, defining ‘populism’ simply seems to be a matter of taste. Culinary preferences differ, and so do the opinions of the academic community on the definition of ‘populism’. Just as different ingredients taste differently to different people, words mean different things in different contexts. The same holds for those providing intellectual nourishment in our society: writers and speakers adapt their vocabularies to their audiences, and try to cater for different needs. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of 'populism'.

Populism, 2018

Journal of Human Rights and Social Work

Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-American Letters and Studies/Revista Bilingue de Letras e Estudos Luso-Americanos, 2021

istory has demonstrated that political populism is a challenger that can easily erode the institutional checks on executive power necessary for the durability of the democratic regime. Democracy is fragile, and we should be particularly attentive to the lessons of the past as various political populist leaders have popped up in the political arenas across the globe. Recent academic research on political populism has contended that populist political strategies prove particularly effective when they rely on the control of the emotional response of voters, especially at times of socioeconomic constraints. Illustrative studies include Salmela and von Scheve's (2017), which argues that repressed shame is the critical emotion that gradually builds the widespread support for political populism, and Landowski's (2020), which establishes that esthesia, i.e., the exacerbated incitement of feelings to generate the audience's emotional responses, is the basis of the political populist rhetoric. In view of this, to what extent we can also learn about this matter from is the question we can all ask ourselves. Various writers have instigated widespread discussion about totalitarianism by imagining the social implications of the far-reaching consequences of governments that have built up on populations' emotional responses in order to implement their political strategies. George Orwell's, Aldous Huxley's, and H.G. Wells's dystopian narratives show us that everything could indeed have gone wrong in the twentieth century and that glimpses of heaven actually anticipated nightmarish experiences. In addition, streaming service Hulu's television series The Handmaid's Tale (2017), based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel of the same name, has proven that a dystopian narrative that imagines societies riddled with misogyny and other forms of oppression is a valuable starter to discuss present-day politics and societal issues. Montanha Distante, António Ladeira's latest novel, is a critical dystopia that fosters our thoughts about present-day politics, particularly when populist political rhetoric is combined with individual charisma. A Portuguese diaspora writer and a professor of Portuguese language and literatures at Texas Tech University, António Ladeira is the author of a diverse literary production that ranges between poetry and narrative. The two short story volumes Os Monociclistas e outras histórias do ano 2045 and Seis drones: novas histórias do ano 2045 were published in Portugal in 2018 by On y va, the same publisher that also launched Montanha Distante at the end of 2020. Despite these narratives sharing a similar tone that mingles subtle irony with a dystopian perspective of life, Montanha Distante offers a significant difference: unlike Ladeira's short stories, this narrative is not set in a particular future. Dates are never specified, and this fact alone should be enough to startle us because the possibility of situating consequences of extreme situations in a chronological future is derailed. As a matter of fact, this narrative lacks any idea of future, although we can easily foresee that the future can be gloomy as the plot resembles the entanglements of present-day populist politics.

2020

This interview in the International Affairs Forum, Spring, 2017, now on line, Harry Boyte describes his experiences and theorization of populism in America from the 1960s until today. The link is here http://www.ia-forum.org/Content/ViewInternalDocument.cfm?ContentID=8726 Boyte begins with an encounter with the Klu Klux Klan in the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King's subsequent assignment for him to organize poor whites. He describes his developing theorization of "civic populism," focused on agency and citizen co-creation and responsibility for a democratic way of life and its commonwealth of shared goods, and its differences with traditional ideologies of left and right and also ideological populisms. Civic populism, Boyte argues, has a renewed and growing relevance in the digital age as a citizen politics which can reintegrate information systems and institutions into cultural contexts and human relationships. It reframes issues of many kinds -- education, health, environment, economic development and others - from the state centered liberal question or the market centered conservative question to a civic question.