Charles Laughlin
Biographic Data
| ID | 101617 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Laughlin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Laughlin |
| SIGNATURE | LAUGHLIN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loyola Marymount University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4030-2153 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The paranoid infrastructural imaginary of alt-tech
God Is My Sponsored Ad!! My Algorithm!”
This article employs Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to analyze the affective public surrounding the hashtag #christiantiktok. We find that “Christian TikTok” discursively negotiates the unpredictable visibility affordances of TikTok’s algorithm by ascribing layers of spiritual significance to how the algorithm delivers content. Our research uncovered four key themes to this spiritualized conceptualization of algorithmically con…
Unruly Souls
A hip-hop artist in a hijab stares defiantly at the camera in a YouTube music video.A Twitter user jokes about the trauma she endured in Christian purity culture.Two women laugh on a podcast as they talk about "gender apartheid" in American Christianity.These are among the tactics of resistance that Kristin Peterson spotlights in Unruly Souls: the digital activism of Muslim and Christian feminists.Peterson dedicates her book to "all the unruly so…
Are you me?”
In this study we performed a critical discourse analysis of the r/workingmoms subreddit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020). Using this data we argue that Reddit’s platform can facilitate what we schematize as feminist “identity spaces.” We use the heuristic of “spaces” rather than “networks” or “online communities” and connect this theorization to our understanding of the discursive work on the subreddit which facilit…
Unruly Souls
Unruly Souls: The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists." The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 0(aop), pp
The Millennial Medium
Through evidence gathered from sixteen interviews with producers and businesspeople in the podcast industry, this paper argues that the professionals that populated the early phase of the formalizing podcasting scene made up an interpretive community defined, in part, by their appreciation for, and experiences with, public radio. I chart how this interpretive community cast themselves against dominant public radio paradigms when they moved into p…
Care as infrastructure
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the United States government promoted the idea of care as infrastructure to justify government spending on nonphysical infrastructures. In this article, we demonstrate the usefulness of adopting an infrastructure framework for researching care and caring through an analysis of working mothers' communication on Reddit in the early days of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Employing infrastructural inversion as a heuristic, we co…
Made in Censorship
Made in Censorship is a highly-engaging study of the ways in which the almost unmentionable June Fourth (1989) democracy movement and its violent suppression have been productive of a variety of meaningful literary and cinematic discourses. Made in Censorship is also a reconsideration of censorship and how it works, often paradoxically, in the People's Republic of China, as a productive endeavor: “This book's central argument is that censorship d…
Reckoning and Repair
This paper focuses on the Black Christian response to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality in the United States. Through a critical discourse analysis of three podcasts and interviews with podcasters, this paper argues that the Black, Christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (Squires, 2002) that seeks to change Christian culture in America. I argue that it is the affordances of the medium of podcasting that make this counterpublic poss…
AmplifyWomen
This study conceptualizes the Twitter response to a Christianity Today article that challenged the role of female Christian bloggers as authoritative figures and centered around the hashtag #AmplifyWomen, as an “affective public”. It employs the method of “hashtag ethnography” to investigate it. The article argues that this public points to the beginnings of a connective feminist movement in evangelicalism brought about by the affordances of digi…
Mystical Love
The authors, both anthropologists who study alternative states of consciousness (ASC), explore the psychodynamics of mystical experience (ME). An affect that is a key factor for and integral to the phenomenology of ME is what they term "mystical love." In many respects, ME refers to ASC that is diametrically opposite to everyday ego-centered, materialist consciousness. In this article we examine several questions, including: (1) Why do humans exp…
Transcendental meditation’s tipping point
Since 2005, the film director David Lynch has been the most visible and vocal proponent for the spread of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a practice brought to the United States by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950s. This paper analyzes the public-facing operations: website, books, and celebrity benefit concerts, through which the David Lynch Foundation interacts with its American audience and charts two moves that the David Lynch Foundation…
Serial, Seriality, and the Possibilities for the Podcast Format
Dreams that Matter
Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture
At the start of the twenty-first century, China is poised to become a major global power. Understanding its culture is more important than ever before for western audiences, but for many, China remains a mysterious and exotic country. This Companion explains key aspects of modern Chinese culture without assuming prior knowledge of China or the Chinese language. The volume acknowledges the interconnected nature of the different cultural forms, fro…
The Relevance of William James' Radical Empiricism to the Anthropology of Consciousness
William James is usually associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and with his interest in religious experiences. But James also developed a methodology which has received far less attention. James called this methodology "radical empiricism," an approach that requires that (1) all of the ideas and theories in science be grounded in direct experience, and (2) no experience be excluded from scientific purview. This paper describes James' thoug…
Apodicticity
This article introduces and evaluates the problem of apodicticity raised by Edmund Husserl, that is, the problem of how to access and interpret scientifically the quality of absolute necessity and certainty of insight that frequently accompanies transpersonal experiences and intuitions in contemplation. An important distinction is drawn between pure and relative apodicticity, and the common co-occurrence of apodicticity and categorical fuzziness …
The Relevance of William James' Radical Empiricism to the Anthropology of Consciousness
William James is usually associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and with his interest in religious experiences. But James also developed a methodology which has received far less attention. James called this methodology "radical empiricism," an approach that requires that (1) all of the ideas and theories in science be grounded in direct experience, and (2) no experience be excluded from scientific purview. This paper describes James' thoug…
Serial, Seriality, and the Possibilities for the Podcast Format
Care as infrastructure
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the United States government promoted the idea of care as infrastructure to justify government spending on nonphysical infrastructures. In this article, we demonstrate the usefulness of adopting an infrastructure framework for researching care and caring through an analysis of working mothers' communication on Reddit in the early days of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Employing infrastructural inversion as a heuristic, we co…
AmplifyWomen
This study conceptualizes the Twitter response to a Christianity Today article that challenged the role of female Christian bloggers as authoritative figures and centered around the hashtag #AmplifyWomen, as an “affective public”. It employs the method of “hashtag ethnography” to investigate it. The article argues that this public points to the beginnings of a connective feminist movement in evangelicalism brought about by the affordances of digi…
Apodicticity
This article introduces and evaluates the problem of apodicticity raised by Edmund Husserl, that is, the problem of how to access and interpret scientifically the quality of absolute necessity and certainty of insight that frequently accompanies transpersonal experiences and intuitions in contemplation. An important distinction is drawn between pure and relative apodicticity, and the common co-occurrence of apodicticity and categorical fuzziness …
Unruly Souls
A hip-hop artist in a hijab stares defiantly at the camera in a YouTube music video.A Twitter user jokes about the trauma she endured in Christian purity culture.Two women laugh on a podcast as they talk about "gender apartheid" in American Christianity.These are among the tactics of resistance that Kristin Peterson spotlights in Unruly Souls: the digital activism of Muslim and Christian feminists.Peterson dedicates her book to "all the unruly so…
God Is My Sponsored Ad!! My Algorithm!”
This article employs Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to analyze the affective public surrounding the hashtag #christiantiktok. We find that “Christian TikTok” discursively negotiates the unpredictable visibility affordances of TikTok’s algorithm by ascribing layers of spiritual significance to how the algorithm delivers content. Our research uncovered four key themes to this spiritualized conceptualization of algorithmically con…
Are you me?”
In this study we performed a critical discourse analysis of the r/workingmoms subreddit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020). Using this data we argue that Reddit’s platform can facilitate what we schematize as feminist “identity spaces.” We use the heuristic of “spaces” rather than “networks” or “online communities” and connect this theorization to our understanding of the discursive work on the subreddit which facilit…
The Millennial Medium
Through evidence gathered from sixteen interviews with producers and businesspeople in the podcast industry, this paper argues that the professionals that populated the early phase of the formalizing podcasting scene made up an interpretive community defined, in part, by their appreciation for, and experiences with, public radio. I chart how this interpretive community cast themselves against dominant public radio paradigms when they moved into p…
Mystical Love
The authors, both anthropologists who study alternative states of consciousness (ASC), explore the psychodynamics of mystical experience (ME). An affect that is a key factor for and integral to the phenomenology of ME is what they term "mystical love." In many respects, ME refers to ASC that is diametrically opposite to everyday ego-centered, materialist consciousness. In this article we examine several questions, including: (1) Why do humans exp…
Dreams that Matter
Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
Apodicticity
This article introduces and evaluates the problem of apodicticity raised by Edmund Husserl, that is, the problem of how to access and interpret scientifically the quality of absolute necessity and certainty of insight that frequently accompanies transpersonal experiences and intuitions in contemplation. An important distinction is drawn between pure and relative apodicticity, and the common co-occurrence of apodicticity and categorical fuzziness …
The Relevance of William James' Radical Empiricism to the Anthropology of Consciousness
William James is usually associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and with his interest in religious experiences. But James also developed a methodology which has received far less attention. James called this methodology "radical empiricism," an approach that requires that (1) all of the ideas and theories in science be grounded in direct experience, and (2) no experience be excluded from scientific purview. This paper describes James' thoug…
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture
At the start of the twenty-first century, China is poised to become a major global power. Understanding its culture is more important than ever before for western audiences, but for many, China remains a mysterious and exotic country. This Companion explains key aspects of modern Chinese culture without assuming prior knowledge of China or the Chinese language. The volume acknowledges the interconnected nature of the different cultural forms, fro…
Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
Dreams that Matter
Serial, Seriality, and the Possibilities for the Podcast Format
Transcendental meditation’s tipping point
Since 2005, the film director David Lynch has been the most visible and vocal proponent for the spread of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a practice brought to the United States by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950s. This paper analyzes the public-facing operations: website, books, and celebrity benefit concerts, through which the David Lynch Foundation interacts with its American audience and charts two moves that the David Lynch Foundation…
AmplifyWomen
This study conceptualizes the Twitter response to a Christianity Today article that challenged the role of female Christian bloggers as authoritative figures and centered around the hashtag #AmplifyWomen, as an “affective public”. It employs the method of “hashtag ethnography” to investigate it. The article argues that this public points to the beginnings of a connective feminist movement in evangelicalism brought about by the affordances of digi…
Mystical Love
The authors, both anthropologists who study alternative states of consciousness (ASC), explore the psychodynamics of mystical experience (ME). An affect that is a key factor for and integral to the phenomenology of ME is what they term "mystical love." In many respects, ME refers to ASC that is diametrically opposite to everyday ego-centered, materialist consciousness. In this article we examine several questions, including: (1) Why do humans exp…
Reckoning and Repair
This paper focuses on the Black Christian response to the 2020 uprisings against police brutality in the United States. Through a critical discourse analysis of three podcasts and interviews with podcasters, this paper argues that the Black, Christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (Squires, 2002) that seeks to change Christian culture in America. I argue that it is the affordances of the medium of podcasting that make this counterpublic poss…
Are you me?”
In this study we performed a critical discourse analysis of the r/workingmoms subreddit during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020). Using this data we argue that Reddit’s platform can facilitate what we schematize as feminist “identity spaces.” We use the heuristic of “spaces” rather than “networks” or “online communities” and connect this theorization to our understanding of the discursive work on the subreddit which facilit…
Unruly Souls
Unruly Souls: The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists." The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 0(aop), pp
The Millennial Medium
Through evidence gathered from sixteen interviews with producers and businesspeople in the podcast industry, this paper argues that the professionals that populated the early phase of the formalizing podcasting scene made up an interpretive community defined, in part, by their appreciation for, and experiences with, public radio. I chart how this interpretive community cast themselves against dominant public radio paradigms when they moved into p…
Care as infrastructure
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the United States government promoted the idea of care as infrastructure to justify government spending on nonphysical infrastructures. In this article, we demonstrate the usefulness of adopting an infrastructure framework for researching care and caring through an analysis of working mothers' communication on Reddit in the early days of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Employing infrastructural inversion as a heuristic, we co…
Made in Censorship
Made in Censorship is a highly-engaging study of the ways in which the almost unmentionable June Fourth (1989) democracy movement and its violent suppression have been productive of a variety of meaningful literary and cinematic discourses. Made in Censorship is also a reconsideration of censorship and how it works, often paradoxically, in the People's Republic of China, as a productive endeavor: “This book's central argument is that censorship d…
Unruly Souls
A hip-hop artist in a hijab stares defiantly at the camera in a YouTube music video.A Twitter user jokes about the trauma she endured in Christian purity culture.Two women laugh on a podcast as they talk about "gender apartheid" in American Christianity.These are among the tactics of resistance that Kristin Peterson spotlights in Unruly Souls: the digital activism of Muslim and Christian feminists.Peterson dedicates her book to "all the unruly so…
The paranoid infrastructural imaginary of alt-tech
God Is My Sponsored Ad!! My Algorithm!”
This article employs Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to analyze the affective public surrounding the hashtag #christiantiktok. We find that “Christian TikTok” discursively negotiates the unpredictable visibility affordances of TikTok’s algorithm by ascribing layers of spiritual significance to how the algorithm delivers content. Our research uncovered four key themes to this spiritualized conceptualization of algorithmically con…
Sociology (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · History (5 works)