New Article by Anna Lund in Poetics

We are happy to announce a new article “Laughter and civil repair: A stage-audience encounter” by Anna Lund.

“A world in movement is visible in the arena of the performing arts. Since the “long summer of migration” (also known as the 2015 “refugee crisis”), the field of performing arts for a young audience in Sweden has shown a growing interest in staging migration while elaborating new artistic strategies and modes of participation. Migrant/non-white youth share the stage-audience encounter with a white audience born in Sweden, while meeting and interacting with content, including the staging of identities, belonging, and experiences of being “other.” But knowledge about the meanings of these stage-audience encounters is lacking. This article aims to visualize and analyze the potential of repair processes through laughter in the stage-audience encounter of one specific play: Tre Streck. This analysis enables consideration of the main emotions in a civil repair process that addresses recognition gaps. The paper builds on ethnographic research and interviews and takes a theoretically informed approach, making it possible to analyze how individual audience members' emotions and self-understandings are linked to staged experiences. A theoretical contribution is suggested that involves developing civil sphere theory by conceptualizing the need to be sensitive to existential repair in micro-studies of civil repair processes.

Anna Lund


Lund, Anna. 2024. “Laughter and Civil Repair: A Stage-Audience Encounter.” Poetics 103:101883. doi: 10.1016/j.poetic.2024.101883.

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic), and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. She is a cultural sociologist in the tradition of the Strong Program, who focuses on the meaning-making process in her research on international migration. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M.A., M.Phil., and PhD from Yale University. Recent books include The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration (with Carlo Tognato and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds., Palgrave, 2020) and Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (with Victoria Shmidt, Routledge 2021), Besides civil sphere theory, her current research focuses on in-depth cultural sociological analysis and reconstruction of public issues such as perceptions of migration, and the cultural sociology of conspiracy theories.

https://www.cstnetwork.org/jaworsky-bio
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