Editor's Introduction

Two dominant themes can be discerned in the articles collected in the current issue of International Political Sociology. One is a concern with meaning (of words and images, bricks and shipping containers, haunted houses and their revenants) – with the social potency of the meanings carried in such things and with the social conditions out of which meaning emerges. The other theme is the status of knowledge and truth, and how the conceptions of these which underpinned the globalist, neoliberal, technocratic order have come under growing pressure. The dimming of the Enlightenment in a ‘post-truth’ world, the ‘moral panics’ assailing the dominant narratives of globalisation, and the salience of Baudrillard’s writings to our current condition of hypperreality, virtuality, and virality, are all explored.