scholarly journals When Your Motherboard Replaces the Pearly Gates: Black Mirror and the Technology of Today and Tomorrow

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (14) ◽  
pp. 8-32
Author(s):  
Rebecca Anne Peters
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Ideologies ◽  
Self Recognition ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Western Civilization

This paper considers five episodes from Charlie Brooker’s dystopian science fiction anthology series, Black Mirror (2011–present). The episodes selected are those that—as argued in this text—depict the role of technology as replacing that of religion. To build this claim, they will be compared to one another, to the Christian biblical concepts they mirror, and to historical events related to theological debates within Christianity.Throughout the history of Western civilization, Christian belief has played an important role in shaping cultural ideologies. For that reason, it could be argued that Christian ideas continue to penetrate our cultural narratives today, despite declining self-recognition in the West as religious or spiritual. Concepts of the afterlife, omniscience, vengeance, ostracism and eternal suffering spring up in some of the least expectedplaces within popular culture today. This paper argues that Black Mirror depicts the materialization of these concepts through imagined worlds, thus signaling the modern-day specters of Christianity.

Magistri Legis. Eine Studie zur dogmatischen Funktion im industriellen System

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-112
Author(s):  
Pierre Legendre
Keyword(s):  
Social Function ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Cultural Reproduction ◽  
Industrial System ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Law ◽  
New Look

"Der Beitrag reevaluiert die «dogmatische Funktion», eine soziale Funktion, die mit biologischer und kultureller Reproduktion und folglich der Reproduktion des industriellen Systems zusammenhängt. Indem sie sich auf der Grenze zwischen Anthropologie und Rechtsgeschichte des Westens situiert, nimmt die Studie die psychoanalytische Frage nach der Rolle des Rechts im Verhalten des modernen Menschen erneut in den Blick. </br></br>This article reappraises the dogmatic function, a social function related to biological and cultural reproduction and consequently to the reproduction of the industrial system itself. On the borderline of anthropology and of the history of law – applied to the West – this study takes a new look at the question raised by psychoanalysis concerning the role of law in modern human behaviour. "

scholarly journals Repackaging Popular Culture: Commentary and Critique in Community

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tully Barnett ◽  
Ben Kooyman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Big Bang ◽  
Fan Culture ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nerd Culture ◽  
The Big Bang

Contemporaneous with the collision of Science Fiction/Fantasy with the mainstream evident in the success of nerd culture show The Big Bang Theory (2007- ), Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012), the growth of Comic Con audiences and so on, Dan Harmon developed Community (2009- ), a sitcom depicting a study group at a second-rate community college. The show exemplifies a recent gravitation away from the multi-camera, laugh-track driven sitcom formula, alternating between “straight” episodes dealing with traditional sitcom premises, though always inflected with self-aware acumen, and more ambitious, unconventional episodes featuring outlandish premises, often infused with the trappings of genre and geek fandom. The show presents apocalyptic action- and Western-style paintball wars, epidemics that evoke zombie cinema, a Yahtzee game that spirals into alternate timelines, and a high-stakes Dungeons and Dragons game that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy.  Both the straight and the unconventional episodes ultimately serve the same purpose, examining the intersection between nerd culture and everyday life. This essay discusses a number of episodes which exemplify Community’s intersections between everyday life and popular culture, charting the show’s evolving preoccupation with pop culture and intertwining of reality and fantasy. It discusses Community’s self-referentiality as a sitcom, its ambitious and elaborate recreations of and homages to pop culture artefacts, and its explicit gravitation towards Science Fiction and Telefantasy in its third season. Through its various homages to popular culture and ongoing depiction of fan culture, we posit that the show is both a work of fandom and a work about fandom, advocating for the pivotal role of fandom in everyday life and for popular culture as a tool for interpreting, comprehending and navigating life. In this respect, the show contributes to the long history of both the sitcom and Telefantasy as vehicles for cultural commentary.

The construction of a leadership identity based on empathy, care, and participation: María Eliana's history

2021 ◽  
pp. 174114322110380
Author(s):  
Andrea Carrasco ◽  
María E Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Life History ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Leadership Positions ◽  
Leadership Identity ◽  
Self Recognition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Identity Based

Recent academic research highlights the role of leadership identity when thinking about the improvement of the educational field. Based on this research, this article aims to identify and analyze the elements that affect the development of leadership identity in female school principals within the Chilean context. This is achieved by working from a biographical-narrative approach, specifically from the life history technique. This analysis emerges from a considerate reflection on the teachings, and personal and professional milestones highlighted in the biogram. Both personally and professionally, a multiplicity of elements is observed in the life history of María Eliana, influencing the development of her leadership identity, particularly highlighting her self-recognition as a woman. This identity is oriented towards social justice, based on socio-emotional tools such as care, empathy, and participation; and understands and values the role these elements must take in Chilean education. The case study presents tensions for the Chilean educational system, which must be able to address the complexities that women experience while holding leadership positions, especially when challenged with the perspective that school is an inclusive space of social justice.

Paradox and Possibility

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Poyntz
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
The West ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Youth Cultures ◽  
Youth Media ◽  
Mass Reproduction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Texts

The history of youth and media culture can be examined by tracing the relationships between the production, representation, circulation, and consumption of media, technology, and cultural texts aimed at youth markets and audiences. The historical development of youth relates to larger socioeconomic, cultural, and political conditions, including the role of mass reproduction and changes in the conditions of distance that shape youth lives. Youth and mass media first melded together in the West, owing to developments in the United States and the United Kingdom. The histories of media and youth culture in other countries, however, capture differences in youth media relationships. In the contemporary period, the use of YouTube in the West and WeChat in China illuminates the globalization of youth cultures and the ongoing role of a central paradox integral to young people’s entanglements with media around the world: the key media structures that shape and contour youth lives are also the very sites where youth continue to navigate authentic meaning and experience and imagine their own futures.

Eugenic Nostalgia: Self-Narration and Internalized Ableism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kanyusik
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Genetically Engineered ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Disability Identity

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has recently argued that Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go deconstructs ableism’s binary structure by postulating the existence of clone characters who occupy an abject position in a eugenic dystopia precisely because their genetically engineered, idealized able bodies exist to be used to “cure” the disabilities of others. The article builds on Garland-Thomson’s work, discussing the role of science fiction in Ishiguro’s book as a means to explore how ableist narratives contribute to cultural norms that enable an overt disciplining of disabled bodies that still occurs, despite it no longer being socially acceptable, and posits protagonist Kathy H.’s story as a narrative of disability identity that exposes the contradictory nature of a belief in the able body and its opposition to disability. Putatively able-bodied, Kathy narrates her experience of the world from a subject position that undermines a stable construction of the body within an ableist framework, ultimately showing these distinctions to be untenable. By discussing the role of first-person perspective in Ishiguro’s novel as a means to interrogate internalized cultural narratives that perpetuate ableist practices, the article examines how cultural notions of ability and disability function as terms that define through exclusion the citizen-subject in liberal democratic societies.

scholarly journals The Social Construction of Historical Traumas: The Polish Experience of the Uses of History in an Intelligentsia-dominated Polity

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 911-931
Author(s):  
Tomasz Zarycki ◽  
Tomasz Warczok
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The West ◽  
Specific Nature ◽  
Polish Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Identity ◽  
And Control

The article argues that Poland’s mainstream national historical narrative, at least as far as the last two centuries of history of the country is concerned, is full of ‘traumatic’ motives which are regularly used and developed in diverse current political and intellectual contexts. Polish history is imagined to a large extent as an endless chain of 200 years of suffering, caused, among other things, by occupations, wars and exploitation, which are usually seen as not fully recognized in other countries, in particular in the West. The article attempts first of all to explain this specific nature of Poland’s historical identity by the privileged role of the intelligentsia, understood as a specific type of elite based on possession and control of cultural capital. It reconstructs the historical rise of the intelligentsia and its impact on the mainstream narrative in question, pointing to a selective choice of potential ‘traumas’ which are assigned a national status. They may be seen as tools to build positions in what can be called the Polish ‘field of power’, to use the notion coined by Pierre Bourdieu. The particular configuration and recent history of the field of power in Poland is reconstructed in order to explain different strategies of what can be called the social and political construction of historical traumas in Poland.

Wanted: A Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Third World ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Third World

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.

scholarly journals Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S Landes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Technological Advance ◽  
The West ◽  
European Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In the history of technological development, why didn't other regions keep up with Europe? This is an important question, as one learns almost as much from failure as from success. The one civilization that was in a position to match and even anticipate the European achievement was China. China had two chances: first, to generate a continuing, self-sustaining process of scientific and technological advance on the basis of its indigenous traditions and achievements; and second, to learn from European science and technology once the foreign “barbarians” entered the Chinese domain in the sixteenth century. China failed both times. What explains the first failure? I stress the role of the market: the fact that enterprise was free in Europe while China lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights; that in Europe innovation worked and paid, while the Chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise. As for the second failure, China's cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny made it a singularly bad learner.

scholarly journals Presidential Term Limits and the International Community

2019 ◽  
pp. 557-584
Author(s):  
Christina Murray ◽  
Eric Alston ◽  
Micha Wiebusch
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
West African ◽  
Central Question ◽  
The West ◽  
International Consensus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Venice Commission ◽  
External Actors

Proposed changes to presidential term limits are almost always highly contested and have attracted international and regional attention. A central question that faces the external actors is the extent to which it is legitimate to take a position in presidential term limit debates. This chapter considers the policy concerning presidential term limits of three major IGOs, the UN, the AU, and the OAS. It further discusses the way in which IDEA, an IGO with a softer mandate, has responded to the debate on term limits, as well as the role of the Venice Commission, ECOWAS, DRI, the Carter Center, and the West African Civil Society Forum (WACSOF). This review suggests an increasing international consensus that, in countries with a history of authoritarianism and weak democratic institutions, presidential term limits can play an important role in strengthening democratic processes and reducing the likelihood of conflict.

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