Abstract This article examines how audiences use serialized science fiction as a shared framework for reasoning about contemporary politics. We focus on the Star Wars series Andor (2022–2025), which depicts empire as a bureaucratic process rather than an archetypal battle, supplying transferable institutional mechanisms to reason with instead of a simple moral binary. Analyzing 728,624 comments from the show’s primary Reddit community (2022–2026), we conceptualize this interpretive practice as fictional scaffolding, defined as the deployment of a narrative’s relational structure – its configuration of actors, dynamics, and institutions – to make sense of parallel real-world events. Text analysis reveals that discussion within the forum grew more than tenfold and peaked after the series concluded. Crucially, this reasoning is structured rather than purely projective, as distinct narrative elements afford specific, stable concrete referents. We argue that complex serialized fiction can serve as an allegorical public sphere, demonstrating how popular culture can anchor and structure collective political cognition at a productive remove from entrenched partisan reflexes.
The idea that there is a power-laden tension between academic and experiential knowledges is widely known and well rehearsed. It circulates in both social movement spaces and society at large. But how is it that the same story about ‘real-world experience’ vs ‘academic’ theory can serve as a foundation both for a def...
The paper contributes a decolonial-feminist diagnosis, a dialectical praxis of refusal, commons, and dream, and a rights architecture claimable within existing law and, in principle, beyond it.
ABSTRACT:Nested political, environmental, and epistemic crises call for radical solidarity across science and nonscientific disciplines. Given disparate disciplinary histories and epistemic frameworks, how should theater and performance scholars “stand with science”? Outlining the shortcomings of a reliance on defensiv...
This article aims to reconceptualize the legitimacy crisis of algorithmic governance as a problem of epistemic boundaries rather than technical design. Debates on algorithmic justice have largely revolved around transparency, explainability, and user trust, while a more basic question has remained in the background: on...
Harun Serpil· The Turkish Online Journal o...· 0 citations
This article proposes reading Don Quixote as a work of, rather than a supplement to, political theory. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s accounts of narrative configuration and narrative identity, I develop a concept called ‘narrative politics’ to describe the condition when political judgment must proceed through contested int...
The present paper advances a reading of contemporary political apathy by rejecting its reduction to contingent sociological factors, and instead situating it within a transformation of the conditions of belief. Drawing on a Hegelian–Marxian lineage, it reinterprets the notion of
Weltgeist
as a secularized, ‘infra-m...
M. Sciarrini· Philosophy & Social Crit...· 0 citations
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