scholarly journals Zines and Communication

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The United States ◽  
Punk Rock ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Riot Grrrl ◽  
Underground Press ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Do It Yourself

Revolutionaries and romantics, Dadaists and dissidents—these are some of the self-publishing traditions that zine communities embrace and embody. Zines are printed publications characterized by idiosyncratic themes, noncommercial motives, low budgets, do-it-yourself aesthetics, and an independent spirit. They are produced by individuals or collectives of writers, editors, graphic designers, and other artists sometimes known as zinesters. Zines first emerged among sci-fi enthusiasts and later spread through the countercultural, feminist, and punk-rock movements. Zines are a form of alternative media related to, yet distinct from, similar genres such as the left-wing little magazines of the 1930s as well as the later underground press and alternative press. The term fanzine, a contraction coined in the 1940s, preceded the term zine, adopted in the 1970s, although the two words are often used interchangeably. Some consider the former a subset of the latter, signifying only publications made by fans of a particular cultural form or genre (such as science fiction, punk rock, football/soccer, nostalgic TV sitcoms, horror movies, Asian pop culture, or Super-8 filmmaking). These self-publications proliferated in tandem with cheap, accessible reproduction technologies like photocopiers and desktop computers. The term e-zines, a once-fashionable reference to “electronic magazines,” typically denotes web publications that espouse a more professionalized and commercialized ethos than printed zines do. Zines are important social, cultural, and visual documents of the periods in which they are made. These do-it-yourself (DIY) publishers established a graphic language and “zine aesthetic” that significantly influenced mainstream design. Due to the diversity of zines and their producers, people in a wide range of academic disciplines show interest in how these publications are made and used. Many scholars of communication and media studies view zine-making as an exemplar of democratic expression, inclusion, and participation as well as an important shaper of social identities and communities. Zines are popular objects of study in areas such as American studies, graphic design, linguistics, popular culture, sociology, women’s studies, youth studies, and more. Zine collections are valuable resources for archivists, librarians, and educators, as well as for researchers. While the existing canon of scholarship on zines and communication includes many materials from the United States and the United Kingdom, there are also substantial zine communities in South America (including Argentina and Brazil), continental Europe (including Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, and Switzerland), Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. The materials presented in this article emphasize riot grrrl, feminism, fanzines, and technology because these aspects of zine publishing have received comparatively more attention from scholars in the field of communication than have other zine genres and subjects.

Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Radway
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Press ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The 1960S

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.

Beyond Economism

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Ahlquist ◽  
Margaret Levi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Aggregate Behavior ◽  
Self Selection ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Service To Others ◽  
Governance Arrangements

This chapter explores the variation in organizational norms, governance arrangements, and social networks that produce systematic differences in aggregate behavior. Left-wing longshore union members give up time and money to fight on behalf of social justice causes from which they can expect no material return. Parishioners of churches throughout the United States risk jail to shelter asylum seekers. Altruism is common enough, and so are volunteering, political commitment, and unselfish service to others. The chapter asks why and how do some organizations produce membership willingness to self-sacrifice on behalf of a wide range of political and social justice issues. In some instances, the answer may be simple: self-selection. The more interesting cases are those in which individuals join for one reason but come to pursue goals they may not have considered previously.

Science Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aris Mousoutzanis
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Postgraduate Level ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Academic Courses ◽  
Canonical Texts ◽  
The University

There has been a trend for introductory texts on science fiction (SF) criticism to start by announcing that SF is now an increasingly respected genre within academia, with its own canonical texts, major scholars, historical traditions, and theoretical perspectives. An increasing influx of publications, conferences, academic courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, doctorate dissertations, and annual awards would seem to testify to this claim. Even further indications of the recognition of the genre’s respectability, the argument goes, lies in the fact that “mainstream” authors now adopt motifs and conventions of the genre within their own writing, when not embracing it wholeheartedly, including Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to name a few. But it is now time to move beyond this approach to introducing SF that, even unconsciously, reproduces dominant assumptions about cultural value, generic integrity, and canon formation that encourage an almost apologetic tone or the need to justify “Why SF?” in academia. The wide range of sources included in this bibliography demonstrate a complex, diverse, multilayered and ever-expanding corpus of critical work extending across numerous academic disciplines, whose emergence and expansion over the last few decades has been so rapid that it has caught up with or even surpassed other established areas of academic inquiry with a much longer history within the university. To use a concept much favored within the field over the last couple of decades, the singularity of science fiction criticism has already happened. This annotated bibliography is aimed at both the uninitiated scholar or student and the academic who specializes in the area, as it provides a list of introductory works, textbooks, and readers—a publication format that witnessed a sudden upsurge during the 2000s. The list will also attract the attention of readers with an interest in historicist approaches or theorizations from the perspective of cultural studies of identity, specifically gender and race.

The Greening of White Separatism: Use of Environmental Themes to Elaborate and Legitimize Extremist Discourse

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara L. Mix
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Concern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Specific Position ◽  
Base Of Support ◽  
Separatist Movement

Employing an interpretive content analysis of online forums, the author examines use of environmental themes by the United States white separatist movement in its efforts to seek legitimacy and garner a broad base of support. The contemporary white separatist movement draws upon latent National Socialist environmental discursive frames linked to history, spirituality, and stewardship. The lack of a specific position on the environment in the movement permits the manipulation of environmental themes to appeal to a wide range of audiences. Appeals to right wing environmental, population, and anti-environmental audiences include a discourse of environmental skepticism, concerns about immigration and overpopulation and discussion of rights to nature and land. Appeals to left wing and mainstream audiences involve expressions of environmental concern, preservation, stewardship, and rights of nature. A narrative of networking using environmentalism's broad appeal, perceived concerns regarding immigration and population growth, and similarities in racial characteristics was also evident.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Death in the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Intimate Friend ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
European Heritage ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.

Bacurau as Science-Fiction Revenge Fantasy

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-86
Author(s):  
Jocimar Dias
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Colonial Violence

When Bacurau (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) was released in Brazil, it was mainly received as a left-wing critique of the rise of the far right in the country’s political landscape. But some critics argued that the feature’s insistence on graphic violence was actually a celebration of barbarism, equating the oppressed villagers to their genocidal oppressors. This article refutes this view, borrowing from the analysis of science-fiction revenge fantasies and also following Foucault’s genealogical perspective. It argues that Bacurau actually reenacts Brazil’s foundational colonial violence through its complex temporality, in order to rediscover the forgotten past of real struggles that remain surreptitiously inserted in all levels of society, perhaps in the hope that new ways of resistance may flourish from its spectatorial experience.

The Politics of Precaution

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Vogel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Animal Feed ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hazardous Substances ◽  
Risk Regulation ◽  
Scientific Certainty ◽  
European Public ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Regulatory Controls ◽  
Milk Hormones

This book examines the politics of consumer and environmental risk regulation in the United States and Europe over the last five decades, explaining why America and Europe have often regulated a wide range of similar risks differently. It finds that between 1960 and 1990, American health, safety, and environmental regulations were more stringent, risk averse, comprehensive, and innovative than those adopted in Europe. But since around 1990 global regulatory leadership has shifted to Europe. What explains this striking reversal? This book takes an in-depth, comparative look at European and American policies toward a range of consumer and environmental risks, including vehicle air pollution, ozone depletion, climate change, beef and milk hormones, genetically modified agriculture, antibiotics in animal feed, pesticides, cosmetic safety, and hazardous substances in electronic products. The book traces how concerns over such risks—and pressure on political leaders to do something about them—have risen among the European public but declined among Americans. The book explores how policymakers in Europe have grown supportive of more stringent regulations while those in the United States have become sharply polarized along partisan lines. And as European policymakers have grown more willing to regulate risks on precautionary grounds, increasingly skeptical American policymakers have called for higher levels of scientific certainty before imposing additional regulatory controls on business.

Political bullshit receptivity and its correlates: a cross-cultural validation of the concept

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vukašin Gligorić ◽  
Allard Feddes ◽  
Bertjan Doosje
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Persuasive Communication ◽  
Lower Probability ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Total N

Frankfurt defined persuasive communication that has no regard for truth, knowledge, or evidence as bullshit. Although there has been a lot of psychological research on pseudo-profound bullshit, no study examined this type of communication in politics. In the present research, we operationalize political bullshit receptivity as endorsing vague political statements, slogans, and political bullshit programs. We investigated the relationship of these three measures with pseudo-profound bullshit, ideology (political ideology, support for neoliberalism), populism, and voting behavior. Three pre-registered studies in different cultural settings (the United States, Serbia, The Netherlands; total N = 534) yielded medium to high intercorrelations between political bullshit measures and pseudo-profound bullshit, and good construct validity (hypothesized one-factor solution). A Bayesian meta-analysis showed that all political bullshit measures positively correlated with support for the free market, while only some positively correlated with social (political statements and programs) and economic conservatism (programs), and populism (programs). In the U.S., higher receptivity to political bullshit was associated with a higher probability that one voted for Trump (vs Clinton) in the past and higher intentions to vote for Trump (vs Biden and Sanders). In the Netherlands, higher receptivity to political bullshit predicted the intention to vote for the conservative-liberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. Exploratory analyses on merged datasets showed that higher receptivity to political bullshit was associated with a higher probability to vote for right-wing candidates/parties and lower probability for the left-wing ones. Overall, political bullshit endorsement showed good validity, opening avenues for research in political communication, especially when this communication is broad and meaningless.

The Right to Bodily Integrity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Brysk
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
Global Pattern ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Right

In Chapter 7, we profile the global pattern of sexual violence. We will consider conflict rape and transitional justice response in Peru and Colombia, along with the plight of women displaced by conflict from Syria and Central America, and limited international policy response. State-sponsored sexual violence and popular resistance to reclaim public space will be chronicled in Egypt as well as Mexico. We will track intensifying public sexual assault amid social crisis in Turkey, South Africa, and India, which has been met by a wide range of public protest, legal reform, and policy change. For a contrasting experience of the privatization of sexual assault in developed democracies, we will trace campus, workplace, and military rape in the United States.

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