ALT In 2018 and 2019, the Bureau of the Royal Household sponsored a festival in Bangkok called Love and Warmth at Winter's End. Framed as a gift to the Thai people from the then uncrowned King Vajiralongkorn, the free event immersed visitors in vintage imagery and experiences sympathetic to royal absolutism, recruiting visitors to experience as pleasant a past era in which the Thai king's power was absolute. Through an analysis of what visitors described as the festival's fun, Thai atmosphere, I develop a political theory of atmospheres, wherein sovereignty can be understood as a claim to constituting the social through a seemingly immaterial (“fun,” “Thai,” in this case) atmosphere enveloping its members.

ALT Since the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey, 215,000+ ppl have been investigated for allegedly using ByLock, an encrypted-message app. Accordg to gvmt officials & courts, the app was used exclusively by Fethullah Gülen's network, which the Turkish state classifies as a terrorist org. Legal experts transformed ByLock data into vehicles of suspicion that could “testify” to past & future terrorism actions. They did so by combining counterterror doctrine & cultural narratives w/digtl & legal practices, includg data extraction, analysis, legal writg, & courtroom confrontations. I call these practices evidencg terror, a technolegal method that, in setting up suspicion as an element of digtl evidence, wields an extensive visceral & political force that suspends people's civil rights. By transformg digital “memories” into endless sources of punitive action, practices of evidencg terror crystallize a new authoritarian politics, 1 that rests on the intimid of both state burcts & marginalized comms.

ALT Depopulation has become a landmark transformation across different rural areas, one that is often accompanied by collective experiences of abandonment, crisis, and deprivation. On the Azores archipelago, Portugal, people encounter demographic decline as a disorienting loss of familiarity with their environment and especially their horticultural plots. Azorean depopulation, then, is best framed as a spatial phenomenon. Islanders describe their gradually overgrowing land as laden with historical representations, moral principles, and modes of selfhood. At the same time, they lament that it is already lost. Activities in decline-affected gardens, such as growing, tending, and harvesting crops, are tinged by this historical consciousness and are hence particularly “dense” in meaning. Since horticulturalists know that their land is lost, yet continue to cultivate it, their efforts concretely effect a shared historical condition of deterioration.

ALT Materiality tends to play only a marginal role in mainstream theorizations of populism. In Ecuador, however, where populism has been described as norm rather than exception, obras (public works) are a crucial element of politics. They are framed as the gifts of leaders to the people, shaping people's lifeworlds & embedding leaders in physical landscapes. Populism thereby becomes inherently material, as obras enact the categories of “the leader” & “the people” & create personalistic-charismatic links between them. At the same time, obras politics is highly risky, given the populist Manicheanism entangled w/construction projects. Any flaw encountered in the implementation of obras risks delegitimizing their initiator as incapable or corrupt. Meanwhile, “the people” of any obra materialize in divergent, competitive ways. Obras thus become infrastructural to populism, both in their variously spectacular forms & in their unpredictable mediations of everyday lives & citizen-state relations.