Are fashion sketchbooks racist?

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Tanveer Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Fashion Design ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Initial Sample ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Design Students ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Cultural Hierarchies

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.

scholarly journals Real-time spatio-temporal event detection on geotagged social media

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmeen George ◽  
Shanika Karunasekera ◽  
Aaron Harwood ◽  
Kwan Hui Lim
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Event Detection ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Event Time ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Geographical Space ◽  
Media Data

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.

scholarly journals Broadening the Scope of Diversity Management : Strategic Implications in the Case of the Netherlands

2005 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 698-724 ◽  
Author(s):  
Folke Glastra ◽  
Martha Meerman ◽  
Petra Schedler ◽  
Sjiera de Vries
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Ethnic Minorities ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Diversity Management ◽  
The Body ◽  
Organizational Dynamics ◽  
Contextual Approach ◽  
Challenging Tasks

An analysis of theories and practices of diversity management, as illustrated in the case of the Netherlands, shows that they are too narrowly focused on redressing imbalances experienced by ethnic minorities and bridging cultural differences between majorities and ethnic minorities in the workplace. Agencies in the field of diversity management have fallen back on a limited and standardized stock of methods that ignore the specificity of organizational dynamics and largely operate in isolation from existing equity policies. The influence of diversity management has thus remained quite superficial. A contextual approach would broaden both the body of thought and the repertory of methods of diversity management, and strengthen its political and social relations. Such an approach would respond to its most challenging tasks: fostering social justice, enhancing productivity, and breaking the circle that equates cultural difference with social inequality

Outside the Head and Outside Individualism-Collectivism

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marika Lamoreaux ◽  
Beth Morling
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Power Distance ◽  
Uncertainty Avoidance ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Meta Analyses

Cultural differences and similarities can be documented not only at the level of the psyche (people’s motivations, beliefs, emotions, or cognitions) but also via shared, tangible representations of culture (such as advertising, texts, architecture, and so on). In this report, the authors present the results of some exploratory meta-analyses of cultural products. Data were sufficient to analyze a variety of cultural traits: positivity, modernity, high (vs. low) context, uncertainty avoidance, and power distance, as well as other dimensions. Thus, this article documents cultural products that measured traits other than individualism-collectivism, the trait the authors analyzed in an earlier article. The data reinforce the value of studying cultural products and fit with recent calls to branch out from the familiar, individualism-collectivism construct into new axes of cultural difference.

Cultivating Cultural Differences in Asymmetric Power Relations

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sierk Ybema ◽  
Hyunghae Byun
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Cultural Distance ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Specific Power ◽  
Work Relations ◽  
Organizational Settings ◽  
Japanese Firms ◽  
Intercultural Encounters ◽  
Asymmetric Power

In this article we integrate findings from interviews and ethnographic case studies to explore issues of culture and identity in Japanese—Dutch work relations in two different contexts: Japanese firms in the Netherlands and Dutch firms in Japan. It is suggested that cultural identities do not carry a pre-given meaning that people passively enact, as is sometimes assumed, but become infused with meaning in organizational actors’ interpretations that are embedded in specific social contexts. The research contribution this article makes is twofold. First, it illustrates how, in different organizational settings, cultural differences are enacted differently in people’s identity talk, underlining the context-dependent and constructed nature of culture and cultural distance in intercultural encounters. Second, it highlights the particular relevance of a power-sensitive understanding of claims of cultural difference by revealing small, but significant differences in organizational actors’ cultural identity talk that are intimately related to the specific power asymmetries within our research participants’ organizations.

scholarly journals Rethinking the Perceived Self: Samples from Facebook

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Anita Kasabova
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
The Self ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
The Real ◽  
Group I ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Anglo American

Abstract How the self perceives reality is a traditional topic of research across several disciplines. I examine the perceived self on Facebook, as a case-study of self-knowledge on „classical” social media. Following Blascovich & Bailenson (2011), I consider the distinction between the real and the virtual as relative. Perceptual self-knowledge, filtered through social media, requires rethinking the perceived self in terms of social reality (Neisser, 1993). This claim dovetails Jenkins’s (2013) notion of the self as an active participant in consumption. I argue that the perceived self in social media could be conceived in terms of how it would like to be perceived and appraised by its virtual audience. Using Neisser’s (1993) typology of self-knowledge and Castañeda’s (1983) theory of I-guises, I analyse seven samples from Anglo-American and Bulgarian Facebook sites and show that the perceived self produces itself online as a captivating presence with a credible story. My samples are taken from FB community pages with negligible cultural differences across an online teenage/twens (twixter) age group. I then discuss some problematic aspects of the perceived self online, as well as recent critiques of technoconsumerism.

The Spaces Between Us

2014 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Luxury Brands ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
National Population ◽  
The World ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
High Level

Despite having one of the highest per-capita incomes of the world, social and political changes in Qatar have not kept pace with the country’s economic development. The expatriate and national population of the small emirate have access to luxury brands and a variety of Western goods including food as well as hotels. The high level of commercialization, however, does not mean that cultural differences between the various nationalities have been erased. Online forums and social media have provided neutral public spaces where debate and dialogue about identity and values can take place in a way they do not occur in public. This chapter examines a variety of examples through comments by expats and nationals on a number of media sites as well as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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