ABSTRACT
This chapter treats circulation as an empirical and analytical object, examining how populis* moves across Parliaments, mass media, and Twitter in France and Spain during 2019. It shows that discursive convergence can emerge in the absence of traceable attribution between arenas or national contexts. Rather than treating circulation as the movement of discourse between bounded spaces, this chapter highlights how populis* emerge as a shared classificatory resource through situated practices and structurally homologous positions, thereby inviting a rethinking of circulation as a social and communicative process. This chapter argues that such convergence challenges transmission-based understandings of circulation and calls for a conceptual clarification of where and how circulation operates. Drawing on empirical findings, it reflects on the respective contributions and limits of arena-based approaches and field theory and proposes to complement those approaches with practice-oriented perspectives for conceptualising circulation.
