{"pk":1491,"title":"Stuart Hall's Relational Political Sociology: A Heuristic for Right-Wing Studies","subtitle":null,"abstract":"<p>Since 2016, there has been a flood of research on the US right spanning disciplines and methodologies. This article theorizes a conceptual heuristic drawn from the writing of Stuart Hall to integrate this scholarship. To make the case for what I term Hall’s political sociology, I stage a dialogue with Arlie Hochschild, whose 2016 ethnography Strangers in Their Own Land has become a classic in the literature. While both Hall and Hochschild stress the importance of documenting the affective nature of political subjectivities, Hochschild’s investment in a politics of reconciliation prevents her from scaling analysis up to political elites, a move that would enable her to better contextualize her findings. Hall offers a model for such an approach, as he connects political subjectivities to acts of articulation; these acts to hegemonic projects; and the impact of such projects to the conjuncture. I stylize Hall’s four-step conceptual frame as a relational cycle because it reconnects the historicizing work of conjunctural analysis to the felt experience of individual subjectivities. Beyond outlining Hall’s political sociology, I illustrate how its use as a heuristic can integrate recent research on the US right. This scheme corrects for an analytic shortcoming driven by Hochschild’s politics of reconciliation, namely a view that political progress will emerge from small-scale, cross-partisan dialogue. Though Hall offers no easy answers to the political questions of our time, his relational political sociology provides a tool for interlacing the research we have, thus rendering the massive challenges of the moment visible in all their detail.</p>","language":"eng","license":{"name":"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0","short_name":"CC BY 4.0","text":"Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\r\n\r\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0"},"keywords":[{"word":"Stuart Hall"},{"word":"Arlie Hochschild"},{"word":"right-wing studies"},{"word":"articulation"},{"word":"hegemonic projects"},{"word":"conjuncture"},{"word":"political subjectivity"}],"section":"Research Article","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kd5s122","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Tyler","middle_name":"","last_name":"Leeds","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Berkeley","department":"Sociology"}],"date_submitted":"2023-07-03T17:36:26.755000-04:00","date_accepted":"2024-07-01T18:39:25.598000-04:00","date_published":"2024-07-01T18:43:42.496000-04:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"final proof","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/jrws/article/1491/galley/14654/download/"}]}