No abstract

In this study, we examine the social phenomenon known as ‘QAnon’. While QAnon is typically thought of as an exclusively online cultural phenomenon, and thus easily dismissed, it has played a significant role in promoting physical acts of violence—including multiple murders and the attack on the United States Capital on 6 January 2021. Utilizing a qualitative analysis of 300 hours of QAnon-related content, we argue that the widespread beliefs held by QAnon supporters were only possible due to the confluence of feelings of distrust in government and other public officials, purveyors of QAnon that profited in the movement’s success, and a populist digital media environment in which extremist ideas are housed and promoted. We conclude by asking if this is a phenomenon created by greater connectivity, or if this is a byproduct of late-stage capitalism in which social relations continue to be atomized.

Much of the body of literature on LGBT+ populations within the United States place urban areas and so-called gayborhoods as goals and eventualities, paralleling early US studies on immigration. Using a multistage, mixed-methods approach, consisting of secondary analysis of the Pew 2013 Study of LGBT Persons ( N = 1197) and in-depth interviews (35 gay men, 2 trans-identifying individuals, 1 heterosexual woman, and 2 lesbians), we found that rural LGBT+ residents engaged in both short-term and long-term travel to mitigate feelings of being spatially segregated from the loci of gay social life—what Ghaziani (2019a) refers to as cultural archipelagos. However, rural residents also used their geographical location to resist dominant narratives about LGBT+ life. Some of our respondents felt that living in rural areas better situated them to be activists and advocates for LGBT+ rights, while others simply did not feel they could be comfortable within more urban contexts. These findings suggest that rural LGBT+ residents may have delinked their sexual selves with their cultural and political selves, thus illustrating the plurality of rural queer voices that exists. As we also argue, while residence category should be considered as influencing one’s experience, care must be used to avoid overly deterministic accounts. Finally, this article extends earlier work by Brekhus (2003), Mattson (2015), and Ghaziani (2019a) by presenting the meaningfulness of travel to and from queer cultural strongholds.

This article is an attempt to show the dialectical nature of Guy Debord’s (1967/1994, The Society of the Spectacle, Aldgate Press) concept of the spectacle, showing how its employment as a resistance technique by electronic dance music (EDM) subculturalists would also help shape it into a corporately organized culture industry (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/1969). In doing so, we show the overlap between the French Internationalist approach and that of the Frankfurt School, and how the combination of these two concepts provides for a more nuanced conceptualization in which the agency of social actors ultimately resulted in the shaping of the subculture into a culture industry. In other words, we attempt to address the critique that the approaches endorsed by both schools are overly deterministic in their approach. We attempt to overcome this limitation by showing how promoters’ decisions to compromise with law enforcement agencies resulted in changes drastically altering the music subculture.

In this article, we report on the implementation of using the game Werewolf as a student-centered applied-learning activity to teach symbolic interaction theory and concepts. Engaging with symbolic interaction theory can be a powerful experience for students due to its potential to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and analyze students’ everyday life experiences. However, some students may have difficulty grasping the specific details and overall significance underlying the perspective. Moreover, research has shown that undergraduate students often have significant levels of anxiety when confronted with sociological theory in both introductory and upper division theory courses. We aim to address recommendations to incorporate more active learning approaches to social theory by outlining an applied-learning activity based on the role-playing game Werewolf. In the article, we review Werewolf and provide a step-by-step guide on how to implement the activity in the classroom and summarize findings from student assessments and classroom evaluations.