Sounding the Alarm! Between habituation and mobilisation

Taming contemporary risks can be understood in two ways: either as mitigation or as habituation—gradual adaptation to these risks and their incorporation into the “normal order of things.” Sociology often plays both roles, which in itself contributes to tensions and disputes among sociologists.

Equally important as the reflection on risk domestication is the question of its flipside: the practices of anti-habituation. How are such practices conceptualised today? What new insights can we offer about them? What phenomena, processes, and facts are they linked with? What language do we use to describe them? It is also a question about sociology itself: how capable is it of mobilising society—and (in particular) power?

We propose that this session be devoted to a variety of ways in which society and political actors are alerted, mobilised, or shaken out of routine. Who today disrupts social and political complacency? Who acts as the bearer of bad news? Who feels obliged to sound the alarm? What intentions and calculations accompany these acts of warning? And what are their effects?

We hope that this perspective will allow us to better understand the conditions and forms of both individual and collective responses to the process of habituation, which often results not only in a sense of security and equilibrium, but also in passivity and apathy. We are not prescriptive in identifying which specific anti-habituation strategies should be analysed. These range widely—from “woke” culture to whistleblower practices. Our aim is rather to collectively identify the most significant manifestations and consequences of the tension between normalisation and mobilisation.

Rafał Drozdowski & Tomasz Szlendak

Symposium Theme
Key terms include warning, mobilisation, disruption of routines, and awakening from societal coma. Our interest in these themes stems from a certain contrariness, as well as fatigue—and even irritation—with the dominant narrative, which posits that both individual and collective actors have lost the will to act. Indifference, it seems, has become the default response to escalating risk and uncertainty.

But a more pragmatic rationale for this session is the pressing need to reflect on today’s mechanisms for capturing public attention—on who seeks to awaken society, how, to what end, and with what results.

We propose four guiding questions:

First: What serves as the vehicle for alerting, mobilising, and disrupting societal routines?

Second: How is this achieved today?

Third: To what effect?

Fourth—and perhaps it should have come first, as it is the most important: on behalf of what / in response to what are people being awakened and activated?

Most sociologists might consider the first question rhetorical—clearly, this is the domain of social movements, old and new alike. Fair enough, but are they the only actors?

The second question may be the most intriguing. New technologies have enabled—and required—entirely new forms of alerting and activation. The emerging attention economy compels ever more inventive stimulus strategies. Mobilisation in the face of undesirable futures may occur via fact-based education, but also through fearmongering, bribery, flattery, or illusion. And these can be deployed in countless ways—“traditionally,” “modernly,” or “postmodernly”; in good or bad faith; as a vocation or as a job; in the name of values or interests—or all of these at once.

The third question concerns agency: its conditions, its scope, and the durability of outcomes stemming from mobilisation. It is also a temporal question: how long can society (and power…) remain mobilised? And how event-like, and thus inconsistent or short-lived, are contemporary mobilisation efforts?

The final question—on behalf of whom or in response to what the alarm is sounded—admits long and varied answers. Each ideological camp has its own shortlist of “reasons to alarm.” For some, it begins with the climate crisis; for others, with the so-called migrant crisis. Some point to corrupt elites requiring watchdog oversight; others to the moral decay of society that must be corrected by a “pedagogical state.” One thing is clear: alarmists are everywhere.

Organisational Framework of the Session
The panel discussion will be preceded by a brief 10-minute introductory commentary by Rafał Drozdowski. Participants—invited by Tomasz Szlendak—are kindly asked not to deliver formal papers, but instead to offer a 15–20-minute spoken intervention in a relaxed format (1 hour 15 minutes + 10-minute introduction, leaving 45 minutes for discussion). After the individual contributions, the panellists will engage in an open, lightly moderated conversation, responding to one another’s points.

The discussion may be guided by three key questions:

1. What justifies the alarm—on whose behalf or in response to what is it being sounded?
2. How is it done—by what means and through what modes of communication?
3. Who is doing it—and does this “new actor” differ in any significant way from historical alarmists?

Contributions

Practices of Emotional Mobilisation – Maja Sawicka
Alarm may also be raised through mediated practices of emotions, including those that trigger negative emotions, channel outrage and digitally mediated ressentiment. Of interest are the dynamics of social production of emotions in digital interactions that encompass group-based processes of emotional mobilisation, and lead to shaking people out of routines considered harmful or undesirable by those involved in the mobilisation activities.

Mobilising Hatred – Marek Krajewski
Marek Krajewski’s recent publication Nie(nawidzenia) offers a sociological lens on hatred. While we often dismiss hate as an undesirable emotion, it may also function as a socio-technical configuration that mobilises action. Hate brings violence, but also resistance to it; it erodes norms, but can also reaffirm them. In late modernity, hate becomes a resource: a stimulus, a product, even a form of bonding.

Mobilising the Demobilised, Politicising the Apolitical – Jacek Raciborski
Anti-habituation is closely tied to politics. Thus, we must explore both political and anti-political forms of mobilisation, including populist and anti-establishment movements—ranging from religious fundamentalists (e.g., Ordo Iuris), through conspiracy theorists, to radical left- and right-wing actors who aim to overturn the political order.

Triggering Scandal – Marta Bucholc
We observe an increasingly common phenomenon: mobilisation without a plan, programme, or even an idea—driven merely by dissatisfaction with the status quo. Zbigniew Boniek once described such actions as “playing for a scandal,” hoping that something good might accidentally result. We may be witnessing an emerging trend opposite to retrotopia: the destruction of the present in favour of an unknown future.

Those Who Know Better and See Further – Wojciech Goszczyński
Alarm is hard to separate from ecological activism: climate change, migration, and food security. The loudest voices are often emotionally mobilised minorities who believe they know better than the indifferent and misled majority. These actors, such as the radical environmentalists of Last Generation, are defined by their provocative style and uncompromising demands.