The Rise of Chinese Internet Language: Product and Agent of Globalization from Below

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yun Xiao
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
International Development ◽  
Information Exchange ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Network Information ◽  
Online Technologies ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
New Public

Abstract As globalization presses on in China a market economy and democracy have been developed, and ordinary people obtained opportunities at many levels. One of them is their tangible access to media networks, computer facilities, online technologies, and global information exchange, which leads to the rise and expansion of Chinese Internet Language (CIL). Drawing on theoretical perspectives from globalization research, such as globalization and transformation (Steger 2009), as well as globalization and language (Fairclough 2006, 2009), this study intends to examine the emerging CIL and its role in social change. Taking a globalization and language approach, this study seeks to answer questions such as: What characterizes the CIL? How does the CIL reflect the changing social conditions in contemporary China? And how does the cyber community generate new public discourse that drives the changing China? Data used for this study are from three major sources: (1) The corpus-based annual national reports entitled The Language Situation in China《中国语言生活状况报告》Zhongguo Yuyan Shenghuo Zhuangkuang Baogao from 2005 to 2013 (English version in Volumes 1 and 2 of Language Policies and Practices in China, Yuming Li and Wei Li, 2013, 2014), (2) the Semi-Annual Report on International Development in China by CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), and (3) recent Chinese publications, online or printed. Collectively, the data indicate that, with globalization rapidly changing and seriously challenging China, its social conditions and people’s life chances are radically changing, which are measured, evaluated, and reflected on by the language use of grassroots people that is marked with innovations, catch words, and novel forms. Officially branded as low standard and crude, CIL binds together a Chinese-speaking cyber community that generates new public discourse as the pushing hand and uncompromising challenger of the social change “from below.”

scholarly journals The heroes’ children: Rescuing the Great War’s orphans

2021 ◽  
pp. 161189442199268
Author(s):  
Friederike Kind-Kovács
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Child Victims ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
New Public ◽  
War Orphans ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Hungarian State

World War I and its aftermath produced a particularly vulnerable group of child victims: war orphans. This group included children whose fathers had fallen in battle, who had disappeared, or who had not (yet) returned home. Most of Europe’s war and postwar societies witnessed the massive presence of these child victims, and responded in various ways to rescue them and secure their future survival. This article offers an exploration of the ways in which the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and then later the post-imperial Hungarian state, became invested in providing care and relief to Hungarian war orphans. In contrast to other groups of child victims, whose parents were blamed for neglecting their parental duties, war orphans as the offspring of ‘war heroes’ profited from the public appreciation of their fathers’ sacrifice for the war effort and the Hungarian nation. The public discourse in the contemporary Hungarian media offers a glimpse into the emergence of a new public visibility of these child victims and of a new recognition of the societal obligation to care for them. Exploring World War I and its aftermath as a telling example of political transformation in the 20th century, the article showcases how war orphans were taken to personify essential notions of war- and postwar destruction, while also capturing visions of postwar recovery. It furthermore examines how welfare discourses and relief practices for Hungary’s war orphans were embedded in contemporary gender norms, notions of proper Christian morality and ethnic nationalism. On this basis, the article assesses the ways in which the case of Hungary’s war orphans not only mirrors the professionalization but also the fundamental transformation of child welfare in the aftermath of World War I.

Capital Switching and the Role of Ground Rent: 1 Theoretical Problems

1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
R J King
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Rent Extraction ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Speculative Investment ◽  
Capital Switching

The flow of both productive and speculative investment into housing relates to the state of capital accumulation in other economic sectors, as hypothesised in the ‘circuits of capital’ argument, but it also relates to the incentive to ‘switch’ investment into and out of housing, and therefore to expectations of ground rent and the (changing) social conditions that enable ground rent extraction. This is the first of three papers in which the relationships involved in these processes are explored. A series of theoretical problems arising from the argument are dealt with, principally relating to its seeming economic determinism and to an inappropriately narrow treatment of crisis and social change. In the subsequent papers, in this journal, these various ideas will be used to reflect on housing market and related social change in Melbourne from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Living on the Periphery of Youth

Young ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (4_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1S-17S ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Ulrik Sørensen ◽  
Mette Pless
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Young People ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Local Area ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives

Drawing on theoretical perspectives regarding the importance of place and belonging to a place in understanding young people’s lives as well as broader processes of social change and continuity, this article explores conceptions of youth as experienced—and narrated—by young people living in rural areas. The article analyzes how discourses on urbanism and youth can be traced in young people’s narratives about their communities and their own lives as young people; how these discourses seem to frame the young people’s narratives and how they rearticulate these discourses through their accounts (Davies, 2000). In the article, we thus also focus attention on the cracks and opposing discourses that can be identified in the young people’s narratives, and how they influence their relationship with their local area.

How Do We Educate for Peace? Study of narratives of Jewish and Palestinian peace activists

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zvi Bekerman ◽  
Ifat Maoz ◽  
Mara Sheftel
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Peace Education ◽  
Personal Narratives ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Peace Activists ◽  
Peace Study

The present analysis focuses on the personal narratives of peace activists, the facilitators of reconciliation-aimed dialogues between two ethno-national groups in a situation of asymmetrical conflict: Jews and Palestinians. It puts forward the idea that these peace activists bring a wealth of knowledge from their personal and professional narratives to bear on their strategies and practices of social transformation. We posit that foregrounding this knowledge through the analysis of these narratives not only affords a better understanding of their theoretical perspectives, their practices, aims and goals of social change but also can greatly contribute to our better understanding of peace education processes in general and in particular to a consideration of the ways peace activists experience and creatively deal with the dilemmas and challenges they confront in their transformational work.

Multinational Enterprise, Innovation, and Development: Theoretical Perspectives

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick J. W. Egan
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Development ◽  
Value Chain ◽  
Multinational Firms ◽  
Multinational Enterprise ◽  
Firm Level ◽  
Business Studies ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Prior Literature ◽  
Enterprise Innovation

This chapter provides the theoretic background and working hypotheses for the empirical tests that follow in subsequent chapters. The book is informed by substantial literature in several academic subfields, including but not limited to international political economy, international business studies, development economics, and global value chain research. This chapter builds a cumulative theoretic framework for interpreting multinational innovation and comparative institutionalist perspectives. Prior literature and debate inform the hypotheses presented in this chapter, which involve both country and firm level attributes and resulting investment patterns. The chapter considers ideas from international development studies regarding the role of multinational firms in processes of country growth and technological upgrading, theories of the firm and contemporary pressures for polycentric innovation models, and institutionalist perspectives from political science and political economy. This chapter also provides working definitions for key concepts and how institutions might be analytically separated from host country policies. The chapter emphasizes the theoretic support for the causal mechanisms supposed in the various hypotheses.

Going Viral in the Classroom

2013 ◽  
pp. 207-223
Author(s):  
Jessica J. Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Computer Mediated Communication ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Online Technologies ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Classroom Project

This chapter demonstrates the potential for social change in computer mediated communication (CMC) education. A foundational discussion of emerging online technologies in terms of potentials for students and responsibilities of educators is followed with a description of a “best practices” classroom project and incorporation of case-study observations in terms of CMC benefits and challenges. The goal of this chapter is to highlight potential societal outcomes inherent in CMC education for students and educators as agents of social change.

Understanding Public Engagement With Global Aid Agencies on Twitter: A Technosocial Framework

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (12) ◽  
pp. 1684-1707 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saif Shahin ◽  
Zehui Dai
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
International Development ◽  
International Committee ◽  
Development Cooperation ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
The Public ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Agency For International Development ◽  
Development Institutions

This study develops a technosocial framework for assessing the efficacy of global aid agencies’ use of Twitter’s algorithmic affordances for participatory social change. We combine computational and interpretive methods to examine tweets posted by three global aid agencies—U.S. Agency for International Development, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the International Committee of the Red Cross—as well as public tweets that mention these agencies ( N = ~100,000). Results indicate that when an agency (a) replies to or retweets public tweeters, (b) includes publicly oriented hashtags and hyperlinks in its tweets, and (c) tweets about topics that the public is also interested in and tweeting about, the social network that develops around the agency is more interconnected, decentralized, and reciprocal. Our framework can help development institutions build more participatory social networks, with multiple voices helping determine collective goals and strategies of collective action for sustainable social change. We also discuss the theoretical implications and methodological significance of our approach.

Power, Politics and “Sport for Development and Peace”: Investigating the Utility of Sport for International Development

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon C. Darnell
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
International Development ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Development Studies ◽  
Social Politics ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Sport For Development ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Commonwealth Games

Sport is currently mobilized as a tool of international development within the “Sport for Development and Peace” (SDP) movement. Framed by Gramscian hegemony theory and sport and development studies respectively, this article offers an analysis of the conceptualization of sport’s social and political utility within SDP programs. Drawing on the perspectives of young Canadians (n = 27) who served as volunteer interns within Commonwealth Games Canada’s International Development through Sport program, the dominant ideologies of development and social change that underpin current SDP practices are investigated. The results suggest that while sport does offer a new and unique tool that successfully aligns with a development mandate, the logic of sport is also compatible with the hegemony of neo-liberal development philosophy. As a result, careful consideration of the social politics of sport and development within the SDP movement is called for.

scholarly journals English in an EFL Context: Teachers’ and Learners’ Motivations for English Language Learning

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Fatemeh Zarrabi
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Language Learning ◽  
Highly Qualified ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Efl Context ◽  
Efl Teachers

The present study explores the ways in which English is used in public discourse in Tehran-Iran and the motivations of Iranian - English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and teachers towards English language learning. The paper begins with an overview of different places in which English is used in Iran, such as media, public signs, traffic signs, advertisements, products, people’s ordinary lives, and education. A cohort of 327 participants, including 168 Iranian EFL learners (male and female) and 159 experienced Iranian EFL teachers (male and female) responded to an English language motivation questionnaire. The results revealed that there is an active presence of English in Iran. In addition, the majority of Iranian EFL learners and teachers involved in the study regard English as an important part of their lives for many and various reasons such as being up-to-date, love, education, learning a new skill, being promoted, having a better and more highly qualified job and increased life chances.

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