Media and cultural research has an important contribution to make to recent debates about declines in democratic engagement: for example, is celebrity culture a route into democratic engagement for those otherwise disengaged? This article contributes to this debate by reviewing qualitative and...

The relationship between governments and citizens in many contemporary democracies is haunted by uncertainty, and sociologists face the task of listening effectively to citizens' own reflections on this uncertain relationship. This article reflects on the qualitative methodology of a recently...

This article argues that, instead of assuming that we know what ‘cultural citizenship’ involves, we should investigate more closely the uncertainties about what constitutes the ‘culture’ (or cultures) of citizenship. The article argues for the distinctive contribution of cultural studies...

Recent accounts of Habermas's conception of the public sphere concern the interlocking of multiple networks and spaces. In a global context new interfaces between existing (counter-) public spheres can lead to multiple counter-publics. This article explores this phenomenon through the...

This article considers Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture as a sociological argument about the tendencies in contemporary culture and argues that it generalizes from a small pool of evidence, considering arguments that would lead to very different conclusion with other demographics. From there,...

The concept of pilgrimage has a contested history, but this article argues that the Turnerian notion of pilgrimage as a compulsory journey to a focus of shared values remains of fundamental relevance, and is directly applicable to the range of journeys people now make to locations associated...

This article explores the possibilities for new forms of ‘digital citizenship’ currently emerging through digitally supported processes of narrative exchange. Using Dahlgren's (Dahlgren, P. 2003. “Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu.” In Media and the Restyling of...