scholarly journals Beyond anti-welfarism and feminist social media mud-slinging: Jo Littler interviews Angela McRobbie

2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110361
Author(s):  
Jo Littler ◽  
Angela McRobbie

In this wide-ranging interview, which took place in spring 2021, Angela McRobbie talks about her work in relation to social politics, the contemporary conjuncture, cultural studies, decolonisation and feminism. Beginning with a discussion on her experience of Covid, it contextualises these reflections through a discussion of anti-welfarism and the scapegoating of dependency, drawing from her new book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. It moves on to discuss different forms and experiences of feminism: including the neoliberal Anglo-German academic context; the legacies of queer theory and radical feminism; the ‘mud-slinging’ of social media which ‘does not allow us the time and space to rehearse what is really going on’; the need to engage with social policy alongside cultural theory; and the ongoing intersectional work of rewriting the curriculum.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmeen George ◽  
Shanika Karunasekera ◽  
Aaron Harwood ◽  
Kwan Hui Lim

AbstractA key challenge in mining social media data streams is to identify events which are actively discussed by a group of people in a specific local or global area. Such events are useful for early warning for accident, protest, election or breaking news. However, neither the list of events nor the resolution of both event time and space is fixed or known beforehand. In this work, we propose an online spatio-temporal event detection system using social media that is able to detect events at different time and space resolutions. First, to address the challenge related to the unknown spatial resolution of events, a quad-tree method is exploited in order to split the geographical space into multiscale regions based on the density of social media data. Then, a statistical unsupervised approach is performed that involves Poisson distribution and a smoothing method for highlighting regions with unexpected density of social posts. Further, event duration is precisely estimated by merging events happening in the same region at consecutive time intervals. A post processing stage is introduced to filter out events that are spam, fake or wrong. Finally, we incorporate simple semantics by using social media entities to assess the integrity, and accuracy of detected events. The proposed method is evaluated using different social media datasets: Twitter and Flickr for different cities: Melbourne, London, Paris and New York. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compare our results with two baseline algorithms based on fixed split of geographical space and clustering method. For performance evaluation, we manually compute recall and precision. We also propose a new quality measure named strength index, which automatically measures how accurate the reported event is.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-222
Author(s):  
Raoof Mir

Most literature on Mumbai-based Muslim tele-Islamicist Zakir Naik offers an organizational, biographical and ideological profile. This approach has concealed the symbolic significance attached to Naik by his audiences. This paper attempts to explore not only who and what Naik is, but how and where he is located. By incorporating ethnographic and cultural studies approaches, this paper offers fresh insight into Naik and his methods of communicating religion. Taking Srinagar, a city in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, as an ethnographic site, this paper explores how Muslim individuals or groups interpret Naik in relation to their religious worldviews. The articulation of Islam by Zakir Naik through media platforms such as television and social media has contributed to a religious trend in Kashmir, in which people have discovered new ways to think about themselves and to participate in discourses about religion that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.


2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Tanveer Ahmed

Drawing on scholar Marc Augé’s concept of non-place, this article contributes to growing studies that focus on the ways in which fashion produces racism. Recent years have shown a rise in the scrutiny by social media of racist fashion garments and campaigns that problematically stereotype, appropriate and Other marginalized cultures. However, less attention has been given to how racism is constructed through design practices in education and curricula, such as through the different activities and techniques that constitute the fashion ideation process. Indeed, few studies to date have examined how commonplace design tools such as sketchbooks, measuring tapes or mannequins reinscribe forms of Othering. This article sets out to critically examine representations of Othering in fashion design sketchbooks and discuss the role this ubiquitous fashion tool might play in encouraging racist fashion representations. The sketchbooks of undergraduate fashion design students were chosen for this study due to the importance of fashion education as a catalyst for future fashion cultures. From an initial sample of seventy sketchbooks, twelve sketchbooks showed representations of cultural difference through an over-reliance on excessive imagery, with limited text. These strategies showed a pattern of reproducing ahistorical static ideas which reinforce cultural hierarchies. Marc Augé’s concept of non-place is used in this study to refer to how time and space are mobilized using various design techniques and employed within sketchbooks. Such techniques show paradoxical representations of cultural differences, which lack context-specific histories and identities. The study identifies two key strategies used within fashion sketchbooks: firstly, the de-contextualization of cultural difference, and then the re-contextualization of cultural difference. Combined, these strategies show how using collaging techniques in sketchbooks in the fashion design process erases meaning by compressing time and space.


2015 ◽  
pp. 830-850
Author(s):  
Anabela Mesquita ◽  
Ana Ramalho Correia ◽  
Diana Aguiar Vieira

Social media tools are being widely used. Every day we witness new tools appearing or new features being added to already existing tools. Their characteristics allow us to communicate and collaborate without time and space constraints. Moreover, they also help us in the development and creation of new content as well as in the sharing and publishing of it. Since they are so popular, can it be that researchers are also using them in the research workflow process? If they use them, what are the most commonly used tools and their reasons for use? These are some of the questions addressed in this chapter. The authors analyse responses given by a higher education institution to a questionnaire on the use of social media tools. These findings contribute to a greater understanding of the importance of these tools for research purposes.


Author(s):  
Linda L. Brennan

While many organizations and individuals use social media and information technologies (IT) to overcome the limitations of time and space, they often experience unintended consequences from increased immediacy and access. How can they achieve the desirable changes and address the negative effects that can result? This article presents a systematic framework that managers can use to proactively identify ways to either leverage or mitigate the increased immediacy and access. Specific examples are used as illustrations to demonstrate how these issues can be anticipated and used for competitive advantage. They are not offered as specific “prescriptions” for any one organization. Rather, they show how the framework can inform managers as they evaluate proposals for, and implementation plans of, new information systems in their organizations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Holt ◽  
Stuart Murray

This article argues for the value of considering the interaction of literary/cultural studies, disability studies and engineering/design studies in the ongoing development of a critical medical humanities research frame. With a specific focus on prosthesis, but also considerations of embodiment, technology and augmentation as concepts in both cultural/disability theory and engineering/design, we note how the shifting and plastic ideas of ‘the prosthetic’ as used within cultural studies have never been in conversation with scholars who work on prostheses in engineering design or the processes through which such technologies are produced. Additionally, we show that the increased use of systems engineering in the design and construction of prostheses creates fractured ideas of disabled bodies that frequently ignore both the cultural meaning and lived experience of technology use. In design and engineering, prostheses are literal objects, often made to order for a diverse range of clients and produced across different working platforms; in cultural studies, the word creates multiple resonances around both augmented bodies and non-embodied states increasingly understood in terms of assemblage and supplementarity. Working from this, we outline how questions of metaphor, materiality and systems weave through the different disciplines. The article claims that a critical dialogue between the working methods of literary/cultural studies and engineering/design, for all their obvious differences, possesses the potential to create informed and sophisticated accounts of disability embodiment. Our conclusion brings the strands of the enquiry together and points to the merits of engineering the imagination, and imagining engineering, as both a subject and method in future medical humanities research.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 651-667
Author(s):  
Shahrzad Mohammadi

Drawing on feminist cultural studies, this article critically analyzes the interrelationship between state ideology and gender policies in the sporting domain with a particular focus on the prolonged interdiction of Iranian female spectators from stadiums. Data were collected from online social spaces such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The findings suggest that in the absence of free and democratic public spaces for negotiation of their rights, Iranian women have increasingly used social media and online campaigns as enabling platforms to partake in a communication discourse, raise awareness, practice democracy, mobilize masses, and protest against social injustice.


Media Asia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 75-80
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ittefaq ◽  
Syed Ali Hussain ◽  
Maryam Fatima
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Jennifer L Miller

Abstract This year’s review of queer theory focuses on recent scholarship about transgender youth. Most of the scholarship reviewed in this chapter defines transgender expansively to include any identifications and/or expressions of gender that trouble dyadic sex-gender ideologies. Additionally, the scholarship reviewed in this chapter evinces a collapse of scholarship and activism by investing in scholarship as activism. Although queer theory is not often heralded for its use in taking a pragmatic approach to social change, the majority of theorists discussed in the chapter do in fact make practical recommendations for justice-oriented social policy and practice changes that would radically improve the lives of transgender youth. Even more, most of the scholars discussed in this chapter are themselves transgender and are committed to creating a world were trans lives can flourish. They resist liberal accommodation models of trans inclusion and instead theorize what meaningful structural change would look like. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction: Queer Kids; 2. Queer Gender Now; 3. Queer Youth Now; 4. Transgender Youth In and Out of History; and 5. Conclusion.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document