scholarly journals Cultural references in films: an audience reception study of subtitling into Arabic

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Abeer Alfaify ◽  
Sara Ramos Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Audience Reception ◽  
Reception Study

“I haven’t heard anything about religion whatsoever”: Audience perceptions of anti-Muslim racism in Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Weaver ◽  
Lindsey Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Focus Group ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Hasidic Jews ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractSince the late 1990s, Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters have raised controversy, criticism and protest from various groups (for example, from Black activists in 2002 and Hasidic Jews in 2012). The comedy has also been described as satirical or anti-racist. Baron Cohen, as either Ali G, Borat, Bruno, or General Aladeen, has consistently provided comedy that leads to public debate on the relationship between comedy and race, ethnicity and stereotype, and the nature of racism and “othering” in comedy. Despite this tendency, very little research has been conducted on how audiences receive the comedy. We present results from a recent focus group, audience reception study of the comedy of Baron Cohen, which recorded discourse from young people aged 18–29 years (n 49). The article examines the perceptions of Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism in the comedy, focusing on

Audience Reception Analysis of Moroccan Public Service Broadcasting

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-309
Author(s):  
Bouziane Zaid
Keyword(s):  
Focus Groups ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Educational Backgrounds ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
Television Content ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Analytical Tools

Television is one of the most important sources of information and entertainment for the majority of Moroccans. Since 2002, the Moroccan government has put forth policies to regulate the use of television as an important outside source for promoting its development programs. This audience reception study aims to assess the opinions of Moroccan television viewers on the quality of programming provided by the two public service TV stations, Al Oula and 2M. The study applies Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory to examine the interactions of the Moroccan audience with the content of the two public service television stations. This study focuses mainly on television viewers of lower educational backgrounds and those with lower incomes because they could benefit most from the developmental role of public service television. The study examines the extent to which TV programming addresses the viewers’ lifestyles and concerns and the expectations viewers may have of their public service stations. The study uses focus groups as a stand-alone data-gathering strategy because of the multicultural nature of Moroccan society, which is characterized by different ethnic, linguistic and geographic attributes. Focus groups enable researchers to collect rich data in participants’ own words; they are particularly useful when the survey group is illiterate or semiliterate. The application of Stuart Hall’s theory in the Moroccan context reveals some of the model’s strengths as well some of its limitations. While the model provides rich analytical tools that help us understand the relationship between how television producers encode messages and how audiences decode them, this study illustrates the limits of Hall’s theory application to non-western audiences. Hall’s model is founded on the assumption that audiences are capable of decoding the television content and that the variations in the decoding process are the outcome of the audiences’ reactions to the hegemonic message. The study found that this was not applicable to Moroccan audiences and that additional theoretical tools needed to be in place for an audience reception analysis to be complete and substantial.

scholarly journals Frozen Out: Audiences, Affect and Women’s Hockey

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Gall
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Method ◽  
Financial Risk ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Sport Media ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Qualitative Focus Groups ◽  
Representational Power

Every four years, millions of Canadians watch women play hockey during the Olympics. Yet when it comes to regularly scheduled professional games, that audience dramatically decreases. In 2019, low audience numbers led to the closure of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and put the future of professional women’s hockey in jeopardy. As with many women’s sports, broadcasters argue the cost of production is too great, the value of airtime minutes too high to take the financial risk of televising the women’s game without guaranteeing viewers for advertisers. Activists and athletes argue that the audience must be built through broadcaster investment. While scholars have examined hockey for its representational power to define national and gendered identities, there has been shockingly little research into the hockey audience. This mixed method audience reception study seeks to explore the viewing inconsistencies of the audience for women’s hockey. Quantitative results from an online survey (n =685) provided data about viewing habits, perceptions and knowledge. This data informed qualitative focus groups (n = 25) that in turn provided contextualization and reasoning for the quantitative data. Mixed method analysis intersected grounded theory with audience reception, sport media, feminist studies and affect theory to identify a persistent discursive strategy framing women’s hockey as “pure” for resisting the crass commercialization, incessant violence and individualistic star system of professional men’s hockey. I argue that women’s hockey becomes the manifestation of the Canadian myth of hockey; men’s hockey as it used to be. As a nostalgic placeholder devoid of context, contemporary women’s hockey functions within a double bind; virtuous and elevated yet non-viable as a commercial enterprise. This ensures that the sport remains precarious at best. “Pure” women’s hockey also functions as a postfeminist essentializing discourse that solves the gender risk of hockey’s hypermasculinity while disavowing women’s physically aggressive play and sport media’s affective currency. Whereas Olympic women’s hockey relies on patriotic pride for audience affective engagement, professional women’s hockey is framed by cognitive contradictions, “pure” but commercial, gender normative but transgressive. Confused and disconnected from the game and players, audiences are left unaffected.

scholarly journals Frozen Out: Audiences, Affect and Women’s Hockey

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Gall
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Method ◽  
Financial Risk ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Sport Media ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Qualitative Focus Groups ◽  
Representational Power

Every four years, millions of Canadians watch women play hockey during the Olympics. Yet when it comes to regularly scheduled professional games, that audience dramatically decreases. In 2019, low audience numbers led to the closure of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League and put the future of professional women’s hockey in jeopardy. As with many women’s sports, broadcasters argue the cost of production is too great, the value of airtime minutes too high to take the financial risk of televising the women’s game without guaranteeing viewers for advertisers. Activists and athletes argue that the audience must be built through broadcaster investment. While scholars have examined hockey for its representational power to define national and gendered identities, there has been shockingly little research into the hockey audience. This mixed method audience reception study seeks to explore the viewing inconsistencies of the audience for women’s hockey. Quantitative results from an online survey (n =685) provided data about viewing habits, perceptions and knowledge. This data informed qualitative focus groups (n = 25) that in turn provided contextualization and reasoning for the quantitative data. Mixed method analysis intersected grounded theory with audience reception, sport media, feminist studies and affect theory to identify a persistent discursive strategy framing women’s hockey as “pure” for resisting the crass commercialization, incessant violence and individualistic star system of professional men’s hockey. I argue that women’s hockey becomes the manifestation of the Canadian myth of hockey; men’s hockey as it used to be. As a nostalgic placeholder devoid of context, contemporary women’s hockey functions within a double bind; virtuous and elevated yet non-viable as a commercial enterprise. This ensures that the sport remains precarious at best. “Pure” women’s hockey also functions as a postfeminist essentializing discourse that solves the gender risk of hockey’s hypermasculinity while disavowing women’s physically aggressive play and sport media’s affective currency. Whereas Olympic women’s hockey relies on patriotic pride for audience affective engagement, professional women’s hockey is framed by cognitive contradictions, “pure” but commercial, gender normative but transgressive. Confused and disconnected from the game and players, audiences are left unaffected.

scholarly journals Rhetoric and audience reception: An analysis of Theresa May’s vision of Britain and Britishness after Brexit

Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 026339572199141
Author(s):  
Judi Atkins
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Rhetorical Situation ◽  
Audience Studies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
British People

This article demonstrates the value of rhetorical audience studies for analysing constructions of ‘the nation’ and national identity. A key strength of this approach is its recognition of the interplay between the rhetorical situation, the text of the speech, and the audience’s responses to that rhetoric. Using the historical method for investigating rhetoric and its reception, the article examines Theresa May’s efforts to bring the nation together after the 2016 referendum and to offer an inspiring vision of post-Brexit Britain. A textual analysis shows that her rhetoric of Britishness was constructed around an imagined audience of Leave voters, and thus excluded Remainers from her conceptions of Britain and ‘the British people’. The audience reception study supports this finding, as it reveals two competing myths of ‘the nation’ which in turn constituted rival subject positions. In short, May’s epideictic failed to unite the country behind her conception of a strong, cohesive Global Britain.

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