In Love with Inspector Morse: Feminist Subculture and Quality Television

1995 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Thomas

This article consists of textual analysis of a highly successful television series, Inspector Morse, combined with qualitative audience study. The study of Morse and the fan culture surrounding it is presented in the context of a discussion of recent feminist work on the texts and audiences of popular culture. The textual analysis focuses on those elements of the programmes which contribute to its success as ‘quality’ television, and particularly on Morse as an example of the role played by nostalgic representations of Englishness in ‘quality’ media texts of the 1980s. The article goes on to discuss whether the presence of such representations in these programmes leads inevitably to a convergence of ‘quality’ and conservative ideology. The discussion of the ideological subtexts of the programmes then focuses on the area of gender representation, and on the extent to which feminist influences are discernible in this example of quality popular culture, particularly in its representations of masculinity. The second part of the article presents an analysis of a discussion group involving fans of the series, which was organized as part of a larger qualitative study of the fan culture surrounding the programmes. There is a detailed discussion of the impact of the social dynamics of the group on their readings of Morse. The analysis also focuses on the ways in which the discourses identified in the textual analysis, such as gender representation, quality and Englishness, are mobilized in talk about the programmes. Finally, the nature of the group made it possible to discuss the construction of a feminist subcultural identity in talk about a mainstream media text, and to identify irony and critical distance as key components of that identity, particularly in the discussion of the pleasures offered by the romance narratives of the programmes.

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Hunton

This study examines the impact of alternative telework strategies on professional and personal outcomes. The research design is a longitudinal between-participants field experiment with two manipulated factors: satellite office space available (no, yes) and downtown office space available (no, yes). In all four conditions, participants could telework from home. The design incorporated a fifth (control) condition with no telework, reflecting current company policy. One hundred sixty medical coders from a large health care company participated in the experiment. Archival data recorded work locations, task interruptions, quality adjusted task performance, and employee retention, while the experience sampling method (ESM) captured cognitive and affective responses. The findings help to explain the social dynamics of work location autonomy in the rich ecological settings of employees' organizational and personal environments.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 04001
Author(s):  
Petr Egorov ◽  
Anna Adamenko ◽  
Terenty Ermolaev

The article discusses the history of the study of rural youth in Yakutia in the 70-80s. XX century through a historiographic review of scientific works on the youth problem. During the period under review, the role of rural youth increased, she began to actively participate in the socio-economic processes taking place in the countryside, and represented a significant share and the main resource of labor replenishment for the agricultural sector of the economy. In studies of the 70s - early 80s. emphasis was placed on the social aspects of scientific and technological progress, the impact of industrialization and intensification of agricultural production on the social structure of the rural population, and the improvement of its professional, cultural and technical level. Since the mid-1980s, research has begun to raise many complex problems related to rural lifestyles, and especially on such important changes as rural life, spiritual and material needs and needs of various population groups, in particular rural youth, factors and prospects of youth movement between the village and the city. It was established that scientific research allowed to expand scientific ideas about the rural youth of Yakutia, its social dynamics, determining its place and role in society.


Author(s):  
Nancy J. Stone ◽  
Conne Mara Bazley ◽  
Karen Jacobs ◽  
Michelle M. Robertson ◽  
Ronald Laurids Boring ◽  
...  

Increasingly, individuals are using more blended, hybrid, and online deliver formats in education and training. Although research exists about how the physical and social environment impact learning and training in traditional face-to-face settings, we have limited knowledge about how the environment affects learners when they are interacting with technology in their learning situations. In particular, concerns arise about levels of engagement, whether learning is enhanced, the impact or helpfulness of robotics, and how the social dynamics change. These five panelists bring expertise in education at the undergraduate and graduate levels, training within industry and the military, and the use of various teaching and training methods. The panelists will present their perspectives to several questions relative to how the environment can (or cannot) accommodate enhanced learning in education and training when technology is involved. Ample time will remain for audience participation.


Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110519
Author(s):  
Robert Musil ◽  
Florian Brand ◽  
Hannes Huemer ◽  
Maximilian Wonaschütz

This article intends to contribute to the debate on the quantification of gentrification, which is constrained by two main obstacles: firstly, the operationalisation of displacement of socially weak households, which appears as an elusive phenomenon. Secondly, the consideration of the specific urban context, in particular the regulation of the housing market. Based on a case study for Vienna, this paper introduces a new empirical approach, which does not focus on households, but on the tenement conversion of the historic housing stock. Here, the transformation as legal conversion and demolition of historic tenement houses (German: Zinshäuser) serve as an alternative indicator for the operationalisation and quantification of displacement processes. The empirical analysis of Zinshaus transformations observed for 2007-2019 for the first time provides an estimation of gentrification dynamics in Vienna. Results point to a pronounced cyclicality in transformation dynamics. Hence, spatial cluster and hotspot analyses reveal a strong concentration of Zinshaus transformations and a clear shift from central bourgeois to peripheral working-class neighbourhoods. Further, a multilinear regression model confirms the impact of Zinshaus transformations on the social dynamics in these neighbourhoods. However, data do not indicate a social shift triggered by upper-class households, but by new migrant groups and well-educated middle-class households. Beyond the case of Vienna, this analysis underlines the relevance of quantitative gentrification approaches based on housing-market segments and their conversion. It proposes applying the Zinshaus as an indicator to make the variety of the urban context visible.


Author(s):  
Mandy Sadan

This chapter considers the impact of conversion to Christianity among the Kachin peoples of Burma and the role that conflict has had in promoting Christianity as a principal ideological foundation for the social movement of Kachin ethno-nationalism. It challenges the perception that Christianity was a majority belief system before the late 1970s and explores some of the different social dynamics that produced this large-scale conversion beyond the colonial period. It also examines the boundaries between Christianity (specifically American Baptist doctrinal orthodoxies), Theravada Buddhism, and autochthonous belief systems to show how ideological perceptions of threats to the self and the community have been modelled by Kachin Christian ethno-nationalists within the Kachin Baptist Church. It then describes how the social prevalence of this belief system among Kachin youth has created significant shifts in comprehension of ‘Kachin’ history and society, which have also had a transformative effect upon modern Kachin ethno-nationalist ideologies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-71
Author(s):  
Joshua D Atkinson ◽  
Scott Chappuis ◽  
Gabriel Cruz ◽  
Shanna Gilkeson ◽  
Chelsea Kaunert ◽  
...  

This article explores the role of writing about popular culture in politically motivated alternative media. In our study, we engaged in different forms of textual analysis in order to investigate three kinds of articles about Star Wars: The Force Awakens in conservative and liberal alternative media. Specifically, we conducted a close reading of reviews of the film, opinion articles about the film and fluff articles about the film. Essentially, we found that the three types of popular culture articles were necessary for the establishment of strong transformative bridges that allowed for intersections between activist alternative media and mainstream media. In addition, we also found the ideological assumptions embedded within the fluff articles to be the most important aspect of this bridge; these ideologies about culture and consumerism allowed for the strongest intersections to emerge.


Author(s):  
Abigail Locke

This chapter takes a critical social and health psychological perspective to bring together different strands of the contemporary debate around infant feeding, drawing on ideas across the social and health sciences to explore key points of tension. These include media representation of infant feeding, health promotion discourse in a ‘neoliberal’ society, and the impact of contemporary parenting ideologies on parenting practices and parenting subjectivities. It argues that some of the complexities and nuances of the infant feeding debates may be one way of explaining discrepancies in rates and the difficulties inherent in breastfeeding promotion strategies. Some of this stems from the ways in which it is approached — as a topic in its own right or as part of a larger jigsaw of early parenting. The former approach runs the risk of ignoring wider issues that are impacting on infant feeding; the latter runs the risk of downplaying infant feeding methods. The chapter aims to reach a deeper understanding of the ways that competing discourses about what it means to be a ‘good parent’, and how we feed our infants, become operationalised in these different standpoints, using contemporary examples to illustrate these points of tension.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lara Strongman

<p>This thesis analyses the conditions of artistic production at two pivotal moments in the reception of modernism in New Zealand: the emergence of a tradition of modernist painting in the work of Colin McCahon in the late 1940s, and the dispersal of that tradition under the impact of postmodernism and postcolonialism circa 1990 in the work of Michael Parekowhai and Ronnie van Hout, among others. Artists’ distinctive engagement with a broad compass of visual culture is considered alongside a critique of local high culture in relation to the culture of everyday life. The reception of this work is figured as emblematic of the historical contestation over the representation of the everyday; a struggle for visibility which reveals the social antagonisms of New Zealand culture.  The first part of the thesis considers the vituperative critical response to McCahon’s use of formal devices drawn from comic books and commercial design in the late 1940s, against the background of the establishment of the national high culture. It accounts for the response by exploring the social factors inherent in critical disdain for commercial art and mass culture, which drew on the trenchant opposition of British intellectuals, and suggests that in McCahon’s work popular culture is employed as a form of aesthetic primitivism with which to represent the barbarities of World War II, as well as to express the experience of everyday life in New Zealand to a broad public audience. It concludes that fundamental to the antagonism over his work was disagreement over what constituted local cultural authenticity.  The second part of the thesis considers problems of New Zealand high culture figured in antagonistic relation to the culture of everyday life that were advanced by New Zealand critics in the years after McCahon produced his popular-culture inflected paintings. The anti-Americanism of New Zealand culture is considered in relation to the rise of the ‘comics menace’ as a source of moral panic in the early 1950s. However, the interest of a new generation of New Zealand scholars in popular culture is observed in changing attitudes towards comic strips (and to American culture) in the 1980s. The same scholars also seek new terms for local critical address. A final chapter of this section explores the afterlife of McCahon’s work following his death in 1987, tracking the movement of the work out into the common culture and the high culture’s contestation of his modernist legacy.   The third part of the thesis opens with an account of aspects of art practice under emerging cultural conditions of postmodernism and postcolonialism in New Zealand in the 1990s, and explores the continued role of McCahon’s work in expressing and revising issues of national identity. Central here is ‘Choice!’ (1990), an exhibition of contemporary Māori art, which introduced Michael Parekowhai’s work and precipitated an ongoing discussion on the politics of identity in contemporary art. While Parekowhai located aspects of Māori identity in the traditions of high art and globalised mass culture, other artists interrogated national identity by similar means. The result was an expansion of the terms both of national identity and of the critical territories of the high culture. The thesis concludes by examining the critical furore that arose when Te Papa Tongarewa, New Zealand’s new national museum, opened with the exhibition of a painting by Colin McCahon beside a refrigerator of the same vintage. The debate, which ensued, was largely concerned with the desire of critics to separate the domain of art from the domain of everyday life.  This analysis demonstrates how contestation between the high culture and the common culture represents a recurring and generative dynamic in the history of New Zealand art—in which McCahon is a pivotal figure—during the second half of the twentieth century.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ramírez Plascencia

The advent of internet and other similar technologies has changed the traditional social and political relationships. Since 2015, in Mexico, some election wins have showed that it is possible to win without any support from the mainstream media or, indeed, without being backed by a big political party. Most of the political campaign is then developed through the social networks and digital activism. This article is mainly aimed at understanding the impact of the social networks on the design of campaign strategies, i.e., how to conciliate the interests from different actors and elites in a new hyperconnectivity context.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-352
Author(s):  
Bui Ngoc Son

AbstractThis paper examines recent constitutional mobilisation in China, embodied in the weiquan (right defence) movement, Charter 08 and the 2013 constitutionalism debate. It contrasts Chinese and Vietnamese experience of constitutional mobilisation. This paper argues that constitutional mobilisation in China presents both convergence and divergence with those in Vietnam. The convergence stems from domestic dynamics, the impact of globalisation and the shared features of socialist/communist institutional settings. The divergence is due to Chinese constitutional exceptionalism and Vietnam's instrumentalist approach to global constitutionalism. Particularly, without necessary constitutional opportunity created by the constitution-making process, constitutional mobilisation in China has not created a national constitutional dialogue as has happened in Vietnam. This paper draws attention to the new function of socialist constitutions as a frame for social mobilisation and has general implications for the comparative inquiry into the social dynamics of constitutional law.


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