Politics, performance and presidents
Sociologist Dr Jason Mast focuses his research on large-scale political processes and events such as democratic elections, crises and scandals, and acts of political violence. His work is cultural in that it focuses on how the outcomes of such events are structured by processes of meaning construction and interpretation.
HIs latest book, The Performative Presidency: Crisis and Resurrection during the Clinton Years, brings together literatures describing presidential leadership strategies, public understandings of citizenship and news production and media technologies between the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton and details how the relations between these spheres have changed over time.
In this podcast he also discusses how the performance of politics has played out in the Obama administration.
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