scholarly journals EDITORIAL: A better media deal?

2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-8
Author(s):  
Charu Uppal ◽  
Shailendra Singh ◽  
Patrick Craddock

As this edition of Pacific Journalism Review went to press, Fiji was in the throes of conducting a census. Technology is helping the process. Technology is often associated with democratising the political proc- ess, decentralising the status quo, upholding free speech, promoting direct democracy and amplifying voices that often remain silent. Regardless of the potential of technology to deliver these freedoms, the issues that existed before the advent of the internet, e.g. access to technology (affordability and availability, including the issue of electricity in developing nations), user motivation and skill in using these new gadgets still stand. This edition, jointly produced with University of the South Pacific media staff, publishes a series of articles addressing these issues. On Media Freedom Day, 3 May 2006, the Fiji Media Council, assisted by USP’s regional journalism programme, organised a panel on ‘Media and alleviation of poverty’. The panel—men from the developed world who were either connected to the media industry in Fiji, or owned a great stake in it—talked about everything but the media’s role in alleviating poverty.

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-108
Author(s):  
Pranjali Kureel

Media industry in India has witnessed hegemony of dominant castes since its very inception. Such hegemony has had a huge impact on our everyday lives and how we come to experience the world. This paper attempts to analyze how caste operates in the media sector, from its composition to content and argues that Indian media has played a catalytic role in inflicting epistemic violence over the oppressed castes as it helps dominant discourses to prevail and shapes popular perceptions and culture. After going over journalism, the paper examines cinema and television as both- a tool of maintaining the status quo and also as a medium of resistance and assertion. An analysis of the feminist discourse in media reveals a linear and somewhat exclusionary approach that bars the agency of Dalit women from media representation. At the end, it explores the power of the Internet with respect to the emerging Ambedkarite voices that are strengthening a liberatory framework while reclaiming their worldview.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Newhall Rademacher

This essay examines the political persona of Donald Trump as mediated by the imagery of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir. By evoking and distorting noir’s challenge to the status quo, its suspicion of systems of power and questioning of dominant norms, Trump has fashioned his political persona in ways that deliberately revise the popular conception of the hardboiled hero as brash-talking rebel at the margins of a corrupt system. Reading Trump’s persona through the mediating function of noir exposes how Trump’s rhetoric plays on, and benefits from, a theme of citizen estrangement while simultaneously reinforcing political expediency and self-interested power. Moreover, it is not only Trump who uses noir imagery provocatively to shape his political image. The media have also participated in crafting images of Trump as either entertaining disruptor or more darkly destabilising. As responses to crises of capitalism, corruption, and social fracture, noir narratives provide critical ways of investigating periods of disequilibrium and their resurfacing in the present. Analysing the production, expression, and reception of Trump’s political persona through the historical and discursive structures of noir underscores the salience of the study of persona to reveal underlying fissures in current American politics and society.


2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giulia Cavaliere

The benefits of full ectogenesis, that is, the gestation of human fetuses outside the maternal womb, for women ground many contemporary authors’ arguments on the ethical desirability of this practice. In this paper, I present and assess two sets of arguments advanced in favour of ectogenesis: arguments stressing ectogenesis’ equality-promoting potential and arguments stressing its freedom-promoting potential. I argue that although successfully grounding a positive case for ectogenesis, these arguments have limitations in terms of their reach and scope. Concerning their limited reach, I contend that ectogenesis will likely benefit a small subset of women and, arguably, not the group who most need to achieve equality and freedom. Concerning their limited scope, I contend that these defences do not pay sufficient attention to the context in which ectogenesis would be developed and that, as a result, they risk leaving the status quo unchanged. After providing examples of these limitations, I move to my proposal concerning the role of ectogenesis in promoting women’s equality and freedom. This proposal builds on Silvia Federici’s, Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s and Selma James’ readings of the international feminist campaign ‘Wages for Housework’. It maintains that the political perspective and provocation that ectogenesis can advance should be considered and defended.


Author(s):  
Isabelle Torrance

Abstract Tom Paulin’s Greek tragedies present extremes of bodily abjection in order to service of a politics of resistance that is tied, in each case, to the political context of the drama’s production. The Riot Act (1984), Seize the Fire (1989), and Medea (2010), share a focus on the degradation of oppressed political groups and feature characters who destabilize the status quo. Yet the impact of disruptive political actions is not ultimately made clear. We are left wondering at the conclusion of each tragedy if the momentous acts of defiance we have witnessed have any power to create systemic change within politically rigged systems. The two 1980s plays are discussed together and form a sequence, with The Riot Act overtly addressing the Northern Irish conflict and Seize the Fire encompassing a broader sweep of oppressive regimes. The politics of discrimination in Medea are illuminated by comparison with similar themes in Paulin’s Love’s Bonfire (2010). Unlike other Northern Irish adaptations of Greek tragedy, Paulin’s dramas, arrested in their political moments, present little hope for the immediate future. Yet in asking us to consider if individual sacrifice is enough to achieve radical change they maintain an open channel for political discourse.


2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Índia Mara Aparecida Dalavia de Souza Holleben ◽  
Marlene Lucia Siebert Sapelli

A educação acontece em diferentes espaços. A mídia também é um desses espaços. Por isso, neste artigo, propusemo-nos a analisar algumas questões, que consideramos relevantes e que, em geral, ocultam a hegemonia de uma classe sobre a outra. No processo educativo que acontece por meio da mídia, há uma contribuição para fortalecer tal hegemonia. Isso comprova a não neutralidade da educação. A mídia tem se mostrado como partido ideológico da elite, e o poder que exerce neste espaço social pode ser definido como poder simbólico, atrelado intimamente ao poder econômico, político e, em alguns casos, até coercitivo. Para discutirmos a mídia como instrumento educativo, em favor da manutenção do status quo, optamos em fazê-lo apresentando como duas temáticas que são por ela tratadas: Gênero e o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.   Palavras-chave: Mídia. Educação. Consenso. Hegemonia. Gênero. Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.   Education is settled in different places and the media is also one of these places. Therefore, in this article we propose to analyze some relevant questions that can usually hide the hegemony of a class on the other. In the educative process intermediated by the media, we can notice a contribution to empower this hegemony. This put in evidence the education no neutrality position. The media can be understood as an ideological political organization of the upper class and its power can be defined as a symbolic one, linked to the economic and politician forces and even acting, in some cases, as a coercion element. To discuss the media as an educative instrument, in favor of the of the status quo maintenance, we present two thematic that have been followed: Gender and Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (The Movement of the Agricultural Workers With No Land).   Keywords: Media. Education. Consensus. Hegemony. Gender. Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.


Author(s):  
Milka Marie-Madeleine Malfait

Throughout its history, Artsakh had to guard against the external threats of Neo-Ottomanism. At the present time it is especially relevant. September 27, 2020 marks escalation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh – which means Artsakh in Armenian. This led to six weeks of cease fire, humanitarian disaster, which killed many people and destroyed cultural and religious heritage of Artsakh. The mountainous region is surrounded by Azerbaijani land, although populated by Armenians. Due to the political novelty of this issue, the author employed analytical and descriptive method. The acquired results demonstrate that the history repeats itself in Neo-Ottomanism, which has been a threat to Artsakh and Armenia since its emergence until the present day. In recent years, the concept of reunification with Armenia, as well as the independence of Artsakh, outlined the prospects for the future. The third solution to the conflict became the ceasefire agreement of 9 November 2020, nobly negotiated by Russia to save Armenia from military collapse. However, this solution is more painful than the status-quo. The main conclusion consists in the statement that the international community should be more vigilant and prevent the expansion of such threats.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-49
Author(s):  
Ivan S. Grigoriev

Abstract Of the 206 amendments introduced to the Russian constitution and adopted on July 1, 2020, 24 deal directly with the Constitutional Court, its organization, functioning, and the role it plays in the political system. Compared to many other, these are also rather precise and detailed, ranging from the number of judges on the bench, their nomination and dismissal, to the Court’s inner procedures, new locus standi limitations, and the primacy of the Constitution over Russia’s international obligations. Most changes only reproduce amendments brought to the secondary legislation over the last twenty years, and are therefore meant to preserve the status quo rather than change anything significantly. At the same time, a number of amendments aim at politicizing and instrumentalizing the Court for the president’s benefit, marking a significant departure from the previous institutional development.


Author(s):  
Tara Forrest

This chapter focuses on some of the key intersections between the theories of cinematic realism developed by Siegfried Kracauer and Alexander Kluge. While, on the surface, their definitions of realism may appear very different, on closer view it is clear that both theorists are concerned with the role that a realist film practice can play in displacing the spectator’s vision and, in the process, facilitating a mode of perception that is not inflected by the ‘ideas’ and ‘value judgements’ that shape and delimit our experience of the present. Focusing on Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality and on Kluge’s essays on the political promise of an “antagonistic” realist aesthetic, this chapter explores the role that a realist film practice can play in reanimating the viewer’s capacity to conceive of the possibilities of the future outside the parameters of the status quo.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document