scholarly journals Networked Struggles: Placards at Pakistan’s Aurat March

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daanika R. Kamal
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
A Site

AbstractAurat March [Women’s March] is an annual event organised in various cities across Pakistan to observe International Women’s Day. Since its inception in 2018, the March has been condemned by conservative religious and political segments of society for reasons relating to propriety. This commentary explores how placards predominantly form the object of censure in the movement’s backlash. By reflecting on discourses on mainstream and social media, I first assess the use of placards in constructing networks of feminist voices. I then assess the (re)production of anti-feminist discourses, sparked by commentary on (select) placards and doctored images to promote dis/misinformation campaigns through the convergence of networked misogyny. Placards at Aurat March have therefore constructed a space for resistance—both by the movement and in retaliation to it—shifting the placard to a site of networked struggles over feminist and women’s participation in public spaces.

Madrasas and the Making of Islamic Womanhood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hem Borker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Marriage Education ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
The Media ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
A Site ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Educational Journeys ◽  
The Ideal

This ethnography provides a theoretically informed account of the educational journeys of students in girls’ madrasas in India. It focuses on the unfolding of young women’s lives as they journey from home to madrasa and beyond. Using a series of ethnographic portraits and bringing together the analytical concepts of community, piety, and aspiration, it highlights the fluidity of the essences of the ideal pious Muslim woman. It illustrates how the madrasa becomes a site where the ideals of Islamic womanhood are negotiated in everyday life. At one level, girls value and adopt practices taught in the madrasa as essential to the practice of piety (amal). At another level, there is a more tactical aspect to cultivating one’s identity as a madrasa-educated Muslim girl. The girls invoke the virtues of safety, modesty, and piety learnt in the madrasa to reconfigure conventional social expectations around marriage, education, and employment. This becomes more apparent in the choices exercised by the girls after leaving the madrasa, highlighted in this book through narratives of madrasa alumni pursuing higher education at a central university in Delhi. The focus on journeys of girls over a period of time, in different contexts, complicates the idealized and coherent notions of piety presented by anthropological literature on women’s participation in Islamic piety projects. Further, the educational stories of girls challenge the media and public representations of madrasas in India, which tend to caricature them as outmoded religious institutions with little relevance to the educational needs of modernizing India. Mapping madrasa students’ personal journeys of becoming educated while leading pious lives allows us to see how these young women are reconfiguring notions of Islamic womanhood.

Film as /and Popular Social Text: The Reception of John Trengove’s Inxeba/The Wound and Wanuri Kahui’s Rafiki

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-79
Author(s):  
Gibson Ncube
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Global North ◽  
State Responses

This article is interested in popular and institutional or state responses to the representations of queerness offered in the films Inxeba/The Wound (South Africa, 2017) and Rafiki (Kenya, 2018). Aside from portraying the marked homophobia that continues to circulate on the African continent, the institutional and state responses to the films have overshadowed the positive popular reception which has  characterised conversations around the films on social media and public spaces. This article shows how social media functions as animportant space of contestation for diverse issues relating to non-normative gender and sexual identities. As these films circulate in different spaces and are viewed by diverse audiences, they elicit equally diverse reactions and responses. The article examines how viewers, in Africa and beyond, receive and engage with the queerness represented in the two films. It argues that the multifaceted reactions to Inxeba/The Wound and Rafiki are central to articulating important questions about what it means to be queer in Africa,and particularly what it implies for black queers to inhabit heteronormative and patriarchal spaces on the continent. Through an analysis of the reactions and receptions of the two films in Africa and the global North, it is argued that it is possible to trace important inter-regional, intra-continental and intercontinental dialogues and conversations regarding the representation of queer African subjectivities. The intra-continental and inter-continental dialogues bring to light questions of gaze and viewing that are inherent in the circulation of queer-themed films. Kewords: Inxeba/The Wound, Rafiki, reception, popular culture, queerness

scholarly journals Post-internet Verfremdung

2021 ◽  
pp. 285-298
Author(s):  
Helena Björk
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Vital Part ◽  
A Site ◽  
School Assignment

AbstractThe ease of uploading images on Instagram has meant that a whole generation grows up paying closer attention to visual language. At the same time, Instagram and other social media have come to dominate visual culture to the extent that we need to make an effort to unlearn what they have taught us. Here the internet is seen not only as a vital part of visual culture but also as a site of learning. This chapter presents a school assignment as a possible approach to online visual culture. By creating Instagram fiction, we can understand how social media operate both visually and socially. Parody and estrangement, or the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, are examples offered to examine a phenomenon and activate critical thinking.

scholarly journals EARS – A WHO Platform for AI-Supported Real-Time Online Social Listening of COVID-19 Conversations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina D. Purnat ◽  
Harry Wilson ◽  
Tim Nguyen ◽  
Sylvie Briand
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
Real Time Information ◽  
Time Information ◽  
Social Listening

As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, the accompanying infodemic is being amplified through social media and has challenged effective response. The WHO Early AI-supported Response with Social Listening (EARS) is a platform that summarizes real-time information about how people are talking about COVID-19 in public spaces online in 20 pilot countries and in four languages. The aim of the platform is to better integrate social listening with other data sources and analyses that can inform infodemic response.

scholarly journals New Typologies of Contemporary Shopping Malls in Egypt

2021 ◽  
pp. 95-122
Author(s):  
Karim Wagih Fawzi Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Shopping Malls ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Corporate Websites ◽  
New Public ◽  
Globalized Economy ◽  
The City

Contemporary shopping malls in Egypt have created new public spaces for lifestyle and leisure, which complement the commercial logic of consumer behavior. Mega malls in Egypt are simultaneously merging shopping, leisure, and entertainment, creating an ambivalence. They are representations of the globalized economy, but also manifest a certain uniqueness through their typology, their mode of insertion in the urban fabric and the type of public spaces created in them. This paper traces four new typologies in the design of six mega shopping malls in Egypt, constructed since 2010, as they integrate new public gathering spaces for leisure, recreation, and entertainment. Data on the new malls in Egypt was collected from corporate websites and promotional brochures, Google Maps and Street View, TripAdvisor, social media websites, visitor comments and news articles. A key finding is the trend of integration of large outdoor recreational spaces such as courtyards and plazas in mall design, the inclusion of a water element for attraction as well as the transition in function from simply offering goods and services to one that offers experiences and events to encourage recurring visits to the mall. The transformation of the mall parallels changes in conceptualizing the city of the 20th century as a large marketplace, an emporium of consumption, to conceptualizing the city of the 21st century as a large theatre and a festive place.

scholarly journals For lack of a better word: neo-identities in non-cisgender, non-straight communities on Tumblr

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Feraday
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site

Non-cisgender and non-straight identity language has long been a site of contention and evolution. There has been an increase in new non-cisgender, non-straight identity words since the creation of the internet, thanks to social media platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr in particular has been host to many conversations about identity and self-naming, though these conversations have not yet been the subject of much academic research. Through interviews and analysis of Tumblr posts, this thesis examines the emergence of new identity words, or neo-identities, used by non-cisgender and non-straight users of Tumblr. The work presents neo-identities as strategies for resisting and challenging cisheteronormative conceptions of gender and attraction, as well as sources of comfort and relief for non-cisgender/non-straight people who feel ‘broken’ and excluded from mainstream identity categories. This thesis also posits that Tumblr is uniquely suited for conversations about identity because of its potential for self-expression, community, and anonymity.

No people like #showpeople : Broadway performers' ethnographic social media

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jennifer Spitulnik
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Group I ◽  
Multiple Audiences

The occupational folk group of Broadway musical theater performers uses folklore in public spaces as a kind of representational strategy for the group as a whole. This strategy is significant in representing the group’s identity to itself as well as to outsiders who are invested in knowing more about them, such as Broadway enthusiasts. That is, the group can and does tell the story of itself, representing itself ethnographically, by way of its individual members. Social media technologies provide a platform for Broadway performers to present these native ethnographies both to the public and to other members of the folk group. I argue that these native, self-conscious ethnographic works by musical theater performers are both concerned with representing themselves as individuals, and with representing the cultural group of musical theater performers as a whole. Exploring the folklore and folk identities performed by members of this group in online social media suggests new ways of understanding the politics and practices of ethnography, particularly on social network sites in our postmodern global economy of attention. In this project, the first in any field to consider musical theater performers as a cultural or folk group, I investigate actors’ recognition of and group use of vernacular creative expressionsâ€"folkloreâ€"as a representational strategy. Through this work, I explore the ways in which self-representation on the part of the ethnographic participants claims voice and authority for the group, while simultaneously performing group membership and identity for multiple audiences.

The Spaces Between Us

2014 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Luxury Brands ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
National Population ◽  
The World ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
High Level

Despite having one of the highest per-capita incomes of the world, social and political changes in Qatar have not kept pace with the country’s economic development. The expatriate and national population of the small emirate have access to luxury brands and a variety of Western goods including food as well as hotels. The high level of commercialization, however, does not mean that cultural differences between the various nationalities have been erased. Online forums and social media have provided neutral public spaces where debate and dialogue about identity and values can take place in a way they do not occur in public. This chapter examines a variety of examples through comments by expats and nationals on a number of media sites as well as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Self-Objectification vs. African Conservative Features in the Selfies of Black African Women

2018 ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Endong Floribert Patrick Calvain
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
African Women ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Nigerian Women ◽  
Black African ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Self Objectification

Though popularly construed as a universal phenomenon, selfie taking is gendered and culturally determined. This could be evidenced by the fact that the two socio-cultural forces of conservatism and traditionalism continue to tremendously shape African women's style of taking and sharing selfies on social media. Based on a content analysis of 200 selfies generated and shared by Nigerian women on Facebook and Instagram, this chapter illustrates this reality. It argues that Nigerian women are generally more conservative than liberal in their use of selfies for self-presentation, self-imaging and self-expression in public spaces. Over 59% of their selfies have conservative features. However, despite the prevalence of conservative myths and gender related stereotypes in the Nigerian society, the phenomenon of nude or objectified selfies remains a clearly notable sub-culture among Nigerian women. Over 41% of Nigerian women's selfies contain such objectification features as suggestive postures; suggestive micro-expressions and fair/excessive nudity among others.

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