This review article reflects on the emerging sociology of financial intermediation, focusing on three contributions: Stories of Capitalism by Stefan Leins, The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment by Horacio Ortiz, and Inertia by Yuval Millo, Crawford Spence, and James Valentine. These three studies distance themselves from the performativity literature and approach financial intermediation as a sui generis social phenomenon, offering complementary perspectives with a shared emphasis on actors’ reflexivity. Focusing on areas of convergence, this article discusses the valuation practices, social relationships, and self-justifications of financial intermediaries, calling for more historically-grounded research that situates them within broader capitalist dynamics.

In late January 2025, German police launched an inquiry into an online video of an art-action at the Tesla Gigafactory just outside of Berlin. After first questioning the veracity of the footage, the investigators condemned the art-action as a violation of Germany’s strict ban on Nazi-associated iconography, on the grounds that the projection included a clip of Elon Musk’s Inauguration Day salute and appended the word “HEIL” to the factory’s “TESLA” lettering. This situation—both the reanimation of a gesture and its uptake—raises critical questions about the political and performative force of quotable gestures. This article explores two such reanimations of Elon’s arm. Drawing on documentation, interviews, and media uptake of art-actions by groups in Europe and the UK, I show how these actors have sought to redefine the context of Musk’s gesture and (re)situate it within a larger constellation of emblematic neo-Nazi body movements. My analysis builds on linguistic-anthropological theorizations of gesture, animation, and citationality to argue that these art-actions constitute reanimations of a “rigid” gesture that route critique through an apparently sovereign figure toward its infrastructural grounds.

In their article ‘The modes of performativity’, Unal et al. (2025) argue that the concept of ‘representational interventions’ provides a basis for a meta-theoretical framework through which to understand the performativity literature. Building on a previously published article of my own, this reply briefly outlines three critiques of their contribution. First, given the already existing paradigm of ‘representation as intervention’ (Curran, 2018), I raise questions about the novelty of framing performativity as ‘representational interventions’. Second, while acknowledging the importance of meta-theoretical work, I raise critical questions about the framing of their approach as a heuristic that can accommodate all existing approaches to performativity, suggesting that it is rather a substantive account of performativity with significant ontological presuppositions. Lastly, my reply focuses on inadequacies in their account of performativity as ‘representational interventions’. Specifically, I question their neglect of aboutness, intentionality, and the distinctiveness of agency and reflexivity in conscious animals with ways of experiencing the world. I conclude by arguing for my ‘representation as intervention’ as an alternative approach that avoids these limitations.

This contribution responds to Curran’s critique of our meta-theoretical account of performativity. Developing a distributed account of representation within the DARN framework, which systematizes the performativity literature through four interconnected modes (devices, actors, representations, and networks), we argue that representation retains a genuine dimension of ‘aboutness’, but that this aboutness is achieved and sustained through socio-technical arrangements rather than secured in advance by an individual conscious mind. Against the view that performativity must be grounded in human intentionality and reflexivity, we show that a large and growing share of performative processes operate through devices and networks where no conscious grasp is present at the point of action, as in algorithmic pricing and automated credit infrastructures. Reflexive looping is thus one mode among four, not the ground of all. Performative agency, on this account, belongs to no single agent but is distributed across the whole agencement.

This paper describes and reflects on the imaginaries, knowledge, processes and methods of a new four-year research project called Performing AI (PAI): Governance, Agency and Action – An Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation’s “collaborative and interdisciplinary research” program, the project assembles researchers from three Swiss universities (the Universities of Fribourg and Lausanne and the Zurich University of the Arts) and Japan (University of Tokyo’s General Systems Science department in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences). PAI’s goal is to investigate “AI” from epistemic, ontological, aesthetic and ethical angles, neither taking for granted its “uncontroversial ‘thingness’”, nor assuming received disciplinary frames to fit the purpose. Instead, we address how AI is “performed” – that is, enacted and produced – across different discursive and material sites and contexts. PAI asks multiple questions: How is AI enacted in governmental policy? What does artistic practice do to AI, and what does AI do to artistic practice? How is AI reconfigured in interdisciplinary scientific domains such as artificial life (as opposed to computer science)? How is AI taken up, or reconfigured in the public sphere, including schools, museums and festivals focused on the intersections of art, technology and society?

Most formal research on the imperative sentence type has focused on canonical imperatives, forms like Leave!, which are often characterized across languages by properties such as bare verbal morphology and omission of the subject. Noncanonical imperatives therefore offer an opportunity to investigate imperative properties from a different perspective. This article argues that negation-licensed commands, forms like No smoking!, first introduced in Iatridou 2021, contain an unusual combination of properties that offer a unique insight into the nature of canonical imperatives. This article has two main findings: (i) negation-licensed commands have a morphosyntax similar to that of existential declaratives, but a speech-act update similar to that of canonical imperatives, and (ii) their speech-act update is subtly different from canonical imperatives in a way that motivates a reevaluation of the speech-act operator in canonical imperatives. This article therefore demonstrates that noncanonical constructions are worth studying not only because of their interesting properties, but also because they offer insights into canonical constructions that could not be gathered otherwise.

There are multiple intersecting crises afflicting society, from environmental devastation to the collapse of democracy, from economic exploitation to gratuitous violence, in the so-called “metacrisis.” Universities have both contributed to these crises in various ways, but have also tried to prevent them In this paper, we consider our responses to the metacrisis from our various disciplinary perspectives as four university educators from different scholarly traditions in one institution in Aotearoa New Zealand, We draw from our teaching experiences and our theoretical perspectives to engage in a reflective conversation with each other about how we may address the challenges of the metacrisis. Our conversation illustrates the potential benefits that such reflections, amongst colleagues who are intimately connected to a range of crises, may have to elucidate knowledge, power and performativity, and considers how humility, in a variety of forms, may be important to navigate the metacrisis.

Social innovation (SI) is a promising concept that has been developed and mobilized in academia, government policies, philanthropic programs, entrepreneurial projects. Scholars propose multiple conceptions and categorization of what is SI (trajectories, approaches, theoretical strands, paradigms, streams). Some recent work has also addressed the question of who is doing SI. In both cases, the what and the who remain the key characteristic of SI. Two approaches are confronted: one where SI is more presented as a concept that reproduces the neoliberal–capitalist societies; a second that conceives SI as a transformative and emancipatory pathway. With this article, I contribute to the possibilities to conceive SI as performative concept. My proposition is to analyze SI as a discourse with precise performative practices and apparatus. By doing so, it allows scholars and practitioners to better reflect and identify the effects, tensions and ambivalence and possibilities of SI. Moreover, it gives us few key aspects of what might constitute an emancipatory social innovation.

Norm contestation has become a defining characteristic of our time and a major interest in International Relations (IR) scholarship. However, researchers often view contestation as a repudiation of norm socialization and thus overlook the ways in which contestation occurs within socialization. This article advances an interpretive account based on performativity to capture the role of cultural translation and appropriation as practices of contestation within processes of norm socialization. It makes three key interventions. First, it redefines norm socialization as a process of cultural translation rather than straightforward transition. Second, it investigates various strategies through which actors appropriate norms by disjointing a norm’s normative appeal from its normalizing power – its prevalent interpretation. Third, it underscores how such contestations destabilize the relationships of authority and hierarchy in normative engagements. To illustrate the analytical purchase of this framework, the paper analyses the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s discourses of ‘Islamic democracy’ and the ‘Islamic civil state’ as examples of their performative socialization into the norm of democracy. The paper concludes by reflecting on the democratic promise as well as the precariousness of performative socialization in world politics.