NINA ELIASOPH — Close_to_home_The_work_of_avoiding_polit…

44 published claims from this book.

• Activists switch to depoliticized language when speaking in public.
• Affective closeness to home undermines volunteers’ political competence and imagination.
• An activist sees homelessness as addressable through government pressure coupled with direct personal care
• Avoidance of hard topics is tacit cultural practice rather than a conscious decision.
• Avoiding political talk is cultural convention, not natural human urge.
• Avoiding politics is itself an active cultural performance, not a mere absence of participation.
• Avoiding politics is not rooted in ideological faith in systems working
• Civic voluntarism substitutes feeling effective for actually changing institutions.
• Consuming more robs workers of the leisure that political participation needs.
• Culture operates as tools and values at once, not one before the other.
• Discussing frightening issues reassures children that they are not alone.
• Disguised self-interest can be the sole refuge of democratic hope
• Emotion work demands vary by group and setting rather than being uniform.
• Everyday political avoidance is active communicative work, not mere apathy
• Expressions of narrow self-interest are rhetorical performances rather than literal self-reports
• Fear of seeming pessimistic suppresses citizens’ capacity to analyze present realities
• Feelings are cultivated according to culturally prescribed emotion work rules.
• Middle-class women feel society is collapsing and doubt individual remedies suffice.
• Needs lacking adequate language may cease to be felt
• People choose political issues they judge close and doable.
• People cling to self-interest vocabularies even when they contradict experienced motives
• People frame structural food-safety risks as voluntary lifestyle choices.
• People hedge civic language where it feels dangerous or powerless
• People prioritize problems physically close to their homes over even larger distant threats.
• People rationalize political non-involvement through differing accepted explanations.
• People voice fearful knowledge privately but suppress it in public interview settings.
• People voice political opinions privately but suppress them in group settings.
• Political fragmentation weakens easy left-right orientation
• Political ignorance functions as an effect of cultural discouragement, not merely its cause
• Political questions about toxicity get deflected into anxieties about personal consumption choices.
• Political types differ less in beliefs than in relations to those beliefs.
• Privacy is fine only when citizens may also publicly acknowledge wider social concerns.
• Privatism is sometimes defended as rational retreat from a dry public arena.
• Proximity to danger does not make people politically active.
• Proximity to local danger is diffused by the option of simply leaving
• Skilled, organized volunteers fall silent precisely when divisive topics arise in meetings.
• Structural psychological and cultural explanations of belief are mutually implicated and inseparable
• The ‘close to home’ criterion breaks down when moral concern for creatures overrides proximity.
• The same expressed belief carries different meanings in different groups and moments.
• Volunteers spontaneously raised environmental and racial concerns rather than avoiding them
• Volunteers stretched self-interest theory to absurd lengths to justify their own political powerlessness.
• Volunteers uniformly translate every civic problem into a request for donated personal time
• Volunteers welcomed structured political discussion despite avoiding it informally.
• Volunteers’ digressive familiarity with local concerns was itself the object of study