scholarly journals “Celebrate your bloom story”

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Alora Paulsen Mulvey

Using 27-year-old Canadian beauty blogger Estée Lalonde as a site of automedia analysis (Maguire 2015), this paper argues that through the enactment of domestic femininity in the public sphere, social media influencers embody postfeminist ideals of individual empowerment while selling their branded selves through networked intimacy (Abidin 2015; Gill, 2016). Methodologically, I approach the case study with an understanding of the intersection between online platforms of the intersection between online platforms, life writing, and constructions of the self. Using cross-promotion, scheduled posts, and self-branding, influencers create a cohesive branded self, emphasizing perceived authenticity and a sense of community among followers. The exercise of self-branding is used to gain cultural and material capital (Hearn, 2008). Understanding postfeminism as an analytical lens through which we can problematize media texts (Gill, 2016), I argue that influencer marketing privileges a one-dimensional, postfeminist representation of an empowered young woman following her life’s passion (Duffy & Hund, 2015).

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
H. Şule Albayrak

For decades the authoritarian secularist policies of the Turkish state, by imposing a headscarf ban at universities and in the civil service, excluded practising Muslim women from the public sphere until the reforms following 2010. However, Muslim women had continued to seek ways to increase their knowledge and improve their intellectual levels, not only as individuals, but also by establishing civil associations. As a result, a group of intellectual women has emerged who are not only educated in political, social, and economic issues, but who are also determined to attain their socio-economic and political rights. Those new actors in the Turkish public sphere are, however, concerned with being labeled as either “feminist,” “fundamentalist” or “Islamist.” This article therefore analyzes the distance between the self-identifications of intellectual Muslim women and certain classifications imposed on them. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with thirteen Turkish intellectual Muslim women were carried out which reveal that they reject and critique overly facile labels due to their negative connotations while offering more complex insights into their perspectives on Muslim women, authority, and identity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110638
Author(s):  
Baskouda S.K. Shelley

Using the example of neotoponyms proliferation in Tokombéré (Northern Cameroon) between 1970 and 2011, this paper questions the banal tactics of naming places as a site of public patriarchy contestation. In fact, young people play a crucial role in reinventing local political power forms of interpellation, which enables them to symbolically reappropriate the space. This helps to establish their presence in the public sphere from which they have been side-lined by social elders. Even though it reflects a political expression, the fact remains that the attribution of toponyms does not really help to reverse their domination into social field.


Human Affairs ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Olatunji Oyeshile

Sense of Community and its Sustenance in AfricaThere is no gainsaying the fact that Africa is inundated with many problems which have made the development and the attainment of social order, conceived in normative terms, daunting tasks. It is also a fact that there are many causes of this scenario such as political marginalization, ethnic chauvinism, economic mismanagement, religious bigotry and corruption in its various facets. However, in this disquisition we identify the lack of the development, internalization and application of the sense of community, loosely tagged community consciousness, as a major factor that has aggravated the African crisis and which if addressed can reverse the order of things positively. It is the contention of this paper that fundamentally in the case of Africa, as shown in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria, there has been a blind pursuit of private or individual interests to the detriment of the public sphere or public good. Ironically too, when leaders put up repressive laws in the pretense to pursue the public good, the underlying motive has always been the pursuit of selfish private whims and caprices. We noted that in contemporary Africa a major way towards a desired level of social order and development consists in engendering the required sense of community (a situation in which there is mutual co-operation, interdependence and fellow-feeling) on which other developments can be predicated. Although, the quest and realization of the sense of community is not a grand solution to our myriad of problems in Africa, at least it forms the basis on which we can start to address our problems in Africa in a meaningful way.


Author(s):  
Rachel Baarda ◽  
Rocci Luppicini

Ethical challenges that technology poses to the different spheres of society are a core focus within the field of technoethics. Over the last few years, scholars have begun to explore the ethical implications of new digital technologies and social media, particularly in the realms of society and politics. A qualitative case study was conducted on Barack Obama's campaign social networking site, my.barackobama.com, in order to investigate the ways in which the website uses or misuses digital technology to create a healthy participatory democracy. For an analysis of ethical and non-ethical ways to promote participatory democracy online, the study included theoretical perspectives such as the role of the public sphere in a participatory democracy and the effects of political marketing on the public sphere. The case study included a content analysis of the website and interviews with members of groups on the site. The study's results are explored in this chapter.


Author(s):  
Judith Bessant

This chapter presents a case study of Facu Diaz, a Spanish satirist whose on-line ridicule of the Spanish government created a political furor that brought him before the courts. The chapter engages the problem of the criminalization of political dissent by liberal states in the digital age. The case highlights how digital media is now being used to create content for satire, as well as to replicate and infiltrate more traditional political and media forums, changing many traditional forms of political practice. The case [points to some of the central problems inherent in liberalism which may give reason to curb the enthusiasm of those who think that new digital media creates fresh opportunities for augmenting the ‘public sphere'. It is argued that liberalism as a political theory and ethos, tends to be blind to non-traditional political expressions like satire and other artistic work. In addition, the expansion of security laws in many countries suggests, liberalism's ostensible commitment to freedom needs to be reframed by recalling its historical preoccupation with security.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-81
Author(s):  
Oriol Poveda

Through a case study of the Facebook page of a Jewish Orthodox environmental project based in Germany, this paper explores the ways in which religion and modernity might be made compatible and what role digital media plays in such interaction. On the basis of the empirical material gathered for this paper, the author presents a typology of religious-environmental processes of hybridization. The analysis draws from the concepts of multiple modernities, public religions and religious branding in order to discuss whether the combination of religion and modernity is enabled or compromised by the collapsing of boundaries between the public sphere and the marketplace in late modern societies. The findings suggest that Facebook and its affordances make possible the particular intersections of religion and environmentalism, of public sphere and marketplace, that are characteristic of the case under study.


Noir Affect ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 197-221
Author(s):  
Pamela Thoma

This chapter explores a surprising shift that has occurred in postfeminist popular culture and more specifically “chick culture” in the wake of the global economic crisis. Chick noir forms itself in opposition to those two standbys of twenty-first-century U.S culture, chick lit and the chick flick. If these latter genres perform a humorous remodelling of romance as the “happy object” around which young women should orient self-making or self-improvement projects for the promise of a good life and future feelings of happiness, chick noir has emerged across popular culture to chronicle widespread economic hardship and social decline under neoliberalism. Chick noir narratives are driven by negative affect and deal in the dark side of relationships, domesticity, and the public sphere for women. The chapter takes Gone Girl as its focus. This chapter pays particular attention to ways in which both texts shine a light on modern surveillance culture to explore the textual production of empathy and coercion and the ways in which these texts imagine femininity as a site of surveillance. What emerges is a form of noir affect that dramatizes the absolute lack of a stable or noncontradictory space for the contemporary female subject.


Think ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (37) ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Chris Norris

This essay takes a hard look at the current state of much academic (mainly analytic) philosophy and sets out to diagnose where things have gone wrong. It offers a sharply critical assessment of the prevailing narrowness, cliquishness, linguistic inertness, like-mindedness, intellectual caution, misplaced scientism, over-specialisation, guild mentality, lack of creative or inventive flair, and above all the self-perpetuating structures of privilege and patronage that have worked to produce this depressing situation. On the constructive side I suggest how a belated encounter with developments beyond its cultural-professional horizons – including certain aspects of ‘continental’ philosophy – might bring large (and reciprocal) benefits. I also offer some tentative ideas as to what ‘creativity’ could or should mean as applied to philosophical thinking and writing.


2007 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Ho

Blogging is a twenty-first century phenomenon that has heralded an age where ordinary people can make their voices heard in the public sphere of the Internet. This article explores blogging as a form of popular history making; the blog as a public history document; and how blogging is transforming the nature of public history and practice of history making in Singapore. An analysis of two Singapore ‘historical’ blogs illustrates how blogging is building a foundation for a more participatory historical society in the island nation. At the same time, the case studies also demonstrate the limitations of blogging and blogs in challenging official versions of history.


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