scholarly journals What’s the deal with ‘websleuthing’? News media representations of amateur detectives in networked spaces

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Yardley ◽  
Adam George Thomas Lynes ◽  
David Wilson ◽  
Emma Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Wound Culture ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
True Crime

This article explores websleuthing, a phenomenon widely discussed and debated in popular culture but little-researched by criminologists. Drawing upon a review of existing literature and analysis of news media representations, we argue that websleuthing is much more diverse than previously thought. Encompassing a wide range of motives, manifestations, activities, networked spaces and cases, websleuthing has a variety of impacts upon victims, secondary victims, suspects, criminal justice organisations and websleuths themselves. We conclude that websleuthing is the embodiment of true crime infotainment in a ‘wound culture’ (Seltzer, 2007, 2008) and as such, is deserving of more criminological scrutiny than has been the case to date.

scholarly journals Women managers, leaders and the media gaze

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 314-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Anne Mavin ◽  
Carole Elliott ◽  
Valerie Stead ◽  
Jannine Williams
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
News Media ◽  
Women Managers ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Media Constructions ◽  
The Media ◽  
Representations Of Women

Purpose The purpose of this special issue is to extend the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC)-funded UK seminar series–Challenging Gendered Media (Mis)Representations of Women Professionals and Leaders; and to highlight research into the gendered media constructions of women managers and leaders and outline effective methods and methodologies into diverse media. Design/methodology/approach Gendered analysis of television, autobiographies (of Sheryl Sandberg, Karren Brady, Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard), broadcast news media and media press through critical discourse analysis, thematic analysis, metaphor and computer-aided text analysis software following the format of the Gender Media Monitoring Project (2015) and [critical] ecological framework for advancing social change. Findings The papers surface the gendered nature of media constructions of women managers and leaders and offer methods and methodologies for others to follow to interrogate gendered media. Further, the papers discuss – how women’s leadership is glamourized, fetishized and sexualized; the embodiment of leadership for women; how popular culture can subvert the dominant gaze; how women use agency and how powerful gendered norms shape perceptions, discourses and norms and how these are resisted, repudiated and represented. Practical implications The papers focus upon how the media constructs women managers and leaders and offer implications of how media influences and is influenced by practice. There are recommendations provided as to how the media could itself be organized differently to reflect diverse audiences, and what can be done to challenge gendered media. Social implications Challenging gendered media representations of women managers and leaders is critical to social justice and equality for women in management and leadership. Originality/value This is an invited Special Issue comprising inaugural collection of research through which we get to “see” women and leaders and the gendered media gaze and to learn from research into popular culture through analysis of television, autobiographies and media press.

Experimental Design in the Study of Crime Media and Popular Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cara Rabe-Hemp ◽  
John C. Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Epistemological Foundation ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Major Disadvantage ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Mediated Images ◽  
And Control

In the study of crime media and popular culture, researchers have a wide range of research methodologies at their disposal. Each methodology or standardized practice for producing knowledge involves an epistemological foundation and rules of evidence for making a claim, as well as a set of practices for generating evidence of the claim. The research methodology chosen is contingent upon the question being studied, as each methodology has strengths and weaknesses. As the most stringent research design, experiments are unique because they are the only methodology able to establish causality. This is because experimental design’s major advantage is that researchers can control the environment, conditions, and variables that are being studied. However, experiments suffer from a major disadvantage as well: the precision and control utilized in experiments make it difficult to apply the findings to the real world, referred to as generalizability. This is especially poignant in crime media and popular culture studies where researchers are often interested in exploring how the criminal justice system, participants, and processes are socially constructed and how the mediated images impact our conceptualization of criminality and appropriate criminal justice system responses.

Professional Criminals and White-Collar Crime in Popular Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Criminal Behavior ◽  
White Collar Crime ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Offending Behavior ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Con Artist

In 1940, Edwin Sutherland claimed that the discipline of criminology was operating with an inaccurate view of criminal behavior. He argued that criminology focused too much on the offending of working-class people via the causal mechanisms of poverty, psychopathy, and sociopathy. His theory on white-collar crime was an observation that people of high social class commit crimes and have their own forms of offending behavior. Of this behavior, Sutherland noted that it could be more far-reaching and damaging than offenses committed by the working class, while at the same time encountering less scrutiny and condemnation from society. By taking the first steps into the study of crimes of the powerful, Sutherland opened up discussion of a wide range of nonviolent, financially motivated offenses such as corruption of state officials, fraud, and embezzlement. He proposed the theory of differential association as an attempt to provide a more effective explanation of offending behavior inclusive of the offending of the rich and powerful. During the 20th century, research into white-collar criminals and the professional con artist has revealed broad typologies of offending behavior and patterns of offending. Today, white-collar crime is a broad term that applies to a range of activities and has become shorthand for discussions of crimes that involve deception, abuse of trust, and intelligent criminals. Media representations have emphasized these characteristics and portrayed white-collar criminals and con artists as offending elites, both in terms of social class and type of offending. Film and television depictions present an elaborate form of criminality based on guile and manipulation of victims. The image of the white-collar criminal, the professional con artist, and their victims in popular culture are equally nuanced and tap into ideas about the moral acceptability of this kind of offending. The influence of popular culture on attitudes toward white-collar crime is of great interest in the study of criminology.

Popular Criminology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Kohm
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminological Theory ◽  
Cultural Criminology ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Crime Film ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Crime And Criminal Justice

Popular criminology is a theoretical and conceptual approach within the field of criminology that is used to interrogate popular understandings of crime and criminal justice. In the last decade, popular criminology has most often been associated with analyses of fictional crime film, while in previous decades, popular criminology referred most often to “true crime” literature or, more generally, to popular ideas about crime and justice. While the term has appeared sporadically in the criminological literature for several decades, popular criminology is most closely associated with the work of American criminologist Nicole Rafter. Popular criminology refers in a broad sense to the ideas that ordinary people have about the causes, consequences, and remedies for crime, and the relationship of these ideas to academic discourses about crime. Criminologists who utilize this approach examine popular culture as a source of commonsense ideas and perceptions about crime and criminal justice. Films, television, the Internet, and literature about crime and criminal justice are common sources of popular criminology interrogated by criminologists working in this field. Popular criminology is an analytic tool that can be used to explore the emotional, psychological, and philosophical features of crime and criminal justice that find expression in popular culture. The popular cultural depiction of crime is taken seriously by criminologists working in this tradition and such depictions are placed alongside mainstream criminological theory in an effort to broaden the understanding of the impact of crime and criminal justice on the lives of everyday people. Popular criminology has become solidified as an approach within the broader cultural criminology movement which seeks to examine the interconnections between crime, culture and media.

Ideology in the Crime Genre

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy O. Lenz
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Media Effect ◽  
Entertainment Media ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Media ◽  
Crime Stories ◽  
Causes Of Crime ◽  
True Crime

The media inform the public about crime while also reflecting and shaping thinking about crime. The news media primarily provide information when they report on crime as part of the coverage of public affairs, but they also shape thinking about crime. The entertainment media, particularly television and film crime stories, primarily entertain audiences, but they also reflect and shape public opinion about the threat of crime, the causes of crime, criminal justice policies, and the criminal justice system. The media effect on the general public’s thinking about crime includes both the news media and the entertainment media because the trends toward infotainment in the news media (e.g., docudramas and true crime reality shows) and realism in the crime genre (stories that are based on or inspired by actual events) have blurred the distinction between fact and fiction. The study of ideology in the crime genre includes the development of theories; empirical analyses of the media effect; explaining ideology, film, and television crime stories as legal texts explaining criminal procedure; and the exploration of current issues related to thinking about rights, law, violence, and justice.

The Art of Love Poetry

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Gray
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Meaning And Function ◽  
Comprehensive History

Love begets poetry; poetry begets love. These two propositions have seemed evident to thinkers and poets across the Western literary tradition. Plato writes that “anyone that love touches instantly becomes a poet.” And even today, when poetry has largely disappeared from the mainstream of popular culture, it retains its romantic associations. But why should this be so—what are the connections between poetry and erotic love that lead us to associate them so strongly with one another? An examination of different theories of both love and poetry across the centuries reveals that the connection between them is not merely an accident of cultural history—the result of our having grown up hearing, or hearing about, love poetry—but something more intrinsic. Even as definitions of them have changed, the two phenomena have consistently been described in parallel terms. Love is characterized by paradox. Above all, it is both necessarily public, because interpersonal, and intensely private; hence it both requires expression and resists it. In poetry, especially lyric poetry, which features its own characteristic paradoxes and silences, love finds a natural outlet. This study considers both the theories and the love poems themselves, bringing together a wide range of examples from different eras in order to examine the major structures that love and poetry share. It does not aim to be a comprehensive history of Western love poetry, but an investigation into the meaning and function of recurrent tropes, forms, and images employed by poets to express and describe erotic love.

Jumbos and Jumping Devils

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nisha P R
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is an original and pioneering exploration of not only the social history of the subcontinent but also of performance and popular culture. The domain of analysis is entirely novel and opens up a bolder approach of laying a new field of historical enquiry of South Asia. Trawling through an extraordinary set of sources such as colonial and post-colonial records, newspaper reports, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, photographs, and oral interviews, the author brings out a fascinating account of the transnational landscape of physical cultures, human and animal performers, and the circus industry. This book should be of interest to a wide range of readers from history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies to analysts of history of performance and sports in the subcontinent.

Nothing in Popular Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gad Saad
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
Case Analysis ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Cultural Form ◽  
The Public ◽  
Psychology Today ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Current Article ◽  
Song Lyrics

An evolutionary lens can inform the study of cultural forms in a myriad of ways. These can be construed as adaptations, as exaptations (evolutionary byproducts), as gene–culture interactions, as memes, or as fossils of the human mind. Products of popular culture (e.g., song lyrics, movie themes, romance novels) are to evolutionary cultural theorists what fossils and skeletal remains represent to paleontologists. Although human minds do not fossilize or skeletonize (the cranium does), the cultural products created by human minds do. By identifying universally recurring themes for a given cultural form (song lyrics and collective wisdoms in the current article), spanning a wide range of cultures and time periods, one is able to test key tenets of evolutionary psychology. In addition to using evolutionary psychology to understand the contents of popular culture, the discipline can itself be studied as a contributor to popular culture. Beginning with the sociobiology debates in the 1970s, evolutionary informed analyses of human behavior have engendered great fascination and animus among the public at large. Following a brief summary of studies that have explored the diffusion of the evolutionary behavioral sciences within specific communities (e.g., the British media), I offer a case analysis of the penetration of evolutionary psychology within the blogosphere, specifically the blog community hosted by Psychology Today.

Public Attitudes Toward New Prisons in New Zealand and Deficit Narratives: A Quantitative Survey

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 348-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adele N. Norris ◽  
Kalym Lipsey
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Prison Population ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Quantitative Survey

The imprisonment rate in New Zealand ranks seventh among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Yet the imprisonment of Indigenous people is on par with the United States, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Almost 70% of the prison population in New Zealand is comprised of people racialized as non-White. In 2016, the National Government proposed to spend $2.5 billion over a 5-year period to build new prisons (1,500 prison beds) to accommodate a growing prison population. This study assessed public attitudes toward the need for more prisons and the equity of treatment of individuals within the criminal justice system. Findings from a 2016 and 2017 quantitative survey of 5,000 respondents each year revealed that roughly half of the respondents believed the proposed spending for new prisons to be extremely to somewhat necessary. A large proportion of respondents also believed Māori and Pākehā, if convicted of the same crime, are treated similarly within the criminal justice system. New Zealand scholars have critiqued news media coverage of contentious sociopolitical issues, such as crime and prisons, for employing tactics that have worked to construct a morally and culturally deficit “Other” while normalizing whiteness, rendering it invisible and raceless. This article concludes that this process masks racial disparities of individuals located within the criminal justice system and preserves the ideal that prisons are a normal function of the social landscape.

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