28:T491,

Theorisations of cultural preferences frequently posit a nexus between familiarity and pleasure. The pursuit and enjoyment of our tastes has been linked to the socialised acquisition of embodied cultural competencies and to psychological mechanisms of expectation. A genre such as contemporary art music disrupts this link to familiarity due to its emphasis on the explicitly unfamiliar. Drawing on interviews with concert attendees, this article examines how taste is put into practice and performed in a context marked by ambiguity. The data are significant for the disruption they represent to any idealised notion of how audiences engage with legitimate culture. Not only is the anticipation of pleasure largely absent, but the expression of taste is also far removed from an austere mode of contemplation and appreciation. Affective modes of appreciation are frequently employed, while audiences also often show a reluctance to engage in processes of evaluation. The article argues for the importance of understanding taste as comprising fluid, emergent and contingent strategies for forming an attachment to cultural objects in a field marked by ambiguity.

29:T4c1,

Ukraine’s efforts to resist the Russian invasion have sparked unprecedented levels of civic engagement. While the more tangible efforts to alleviate immediate needs have been prominently featured in mass media and elsewhere, the norms and values that shaped this large-scale collective effort often remain behind the scenes. Approaching narratives of volunteering through a critical cultural sociology lens, we find that wartime involvement constitutes a shift from duty-based norms in which citizens are required or expected to engage in civic activities, to forms of engaged citizenship which contribute not just to the state, but also to the wellbeing of those in need. In this context, volunteering facilitates the emergence of civil society that often occupies the space outside of the currently defined institutional contexts and works through the collective shaping and contestation of social norms and values. Documenting these dynamics provides valuable new insights into the important role volunteerism plays in broader sociopolitical transformations, especially in non-Western and postcolonial contexts where the processes of civil society development take many forms and may be easily overlooked.

2a:T4e6,

Emergent genres can serve as diagnoses of society, particularly dystopias which exaggerate yet articulate problematic elements within modernity. Herein the focus is on ‘dystopian games’, particularly The Hunger Games and Squid Game, part of a wider genre emerging in contemporary culture wherein dystopia is not just totalitarian, oppressive or ideological, but also requires its protagonists to participate in contests and trials which transform them. Arguably, the global success of these texts reflects the cultural resonance of their diagnosis of the contemporary world as itself the ‘scene of a trial’ in Boltanski’s phrase. Following Stark on the sociology of tests, dystopian games can be related to the proliferation of intense competition in education and the labour market, relentless trials and evaluations at work and the contests for attention and popularity on social media. Building a dialogue between social theory and dystopian literature inspired by Foucault’s work on ‘truth-telling’ and ‘transformations’, what emerges is a vision of ubiquitous transformations created by compulsory participation in trials and tests, less emancipatory or self-actualizing than a nightmare.

2b:T6cc,