scholarly journals A Sociocultural Appraisal of Yorùbá Kegites’ Songs

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1.2) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
George Olúsolá Ajíbádé
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Speech Patterns ◽  
Common Practices ◽  
Cultural Content

This is a study of how the oral aesthetics of textual production by a group, the Kegites, are used in the construction of an identity rooted in a collective context that reflects a socio-political engagement with the complex social histories of the Yorùbá society and Nigeria at large. The study identifies common practices of the Kegites and themes of the texts of their songs. It shows the practice of engagement by the Kegites through which identity can be textually constructed in ways that politicize self-representation and challenge discourses grounded in the colonial and postcolonial histories of the Yorùbá people. Through the discussion of themes such as ancestral presence, the aesthetics of orature, and the political significance of group or society (ẹgbé) ̣ among the Yorùbá, the paper seeks to showcase the presence of a characteristic of Yorùbá oral literature in which personal, cultural, economic, social and political issues become inseparable. It demonstrates how oral text reflects societal elements and performers use various societal elements to create an expression of an identity within the multiple currents and traditions by taking the rules, creativity, and artistry of self-representation and shaping them with cultural content, as well as with the rhythms and speech patterns of the Yorùbá people.

Civic and Political Engagement in Youth

2017 ◽  
Vol 225 (4) ◽  
pp. 291-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xenia Chryssochoou ◽  
Martyn Barrett
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Youth Engagement ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Family ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Micro Level

Abstract. This paper reviews the research that has been conducted into youth civic and political engagement since 2010. We begin by noting the claim that youth are not sufficiently engaged either civically or politically. We argue that this claim is probably incorrect: rather than using conventional forms of political participation, youth today are often engaged through nonconventional and civic means instead. We also indicate at the outset some important cautions about the interpretation of research findings in this field, in particular the need to consider the kinds of political issues with which youth are involved, the moments in time at which they are involved, and the societal contexts in which their involvement occurs. We argue that these specificities mean that it might be difficult or even impossible to construct a unified model or comprehensive understanding of youth civic and political engagement. The review then considers recent research findings on the role of micro-, meso-, and macro-level factors in influencing youth engagement. Micro-level factors include political interest, efficacy, ideologies, values, and identity; meso-level factors include the family, school, peers, and the neighborhood; while macro-level factors include political-cultural, economic, legal, and institutional factors. We also review recent findings on the role of young people’s demographic positioning, the effects that social media might be playing in transforming youth engagement, and how political parties can actively mobilize youth. We conclude that young people are far from being apathetic and uninterested in politics, but that they need to find ways to be involved that are meaningful to them. We also indicate some possible future lines of research that could be profitably pursued.

Walking the Talk, from Online to Offline? Analyzing Predictors of Political Engagements in the Case of Cebu City, Philippines

ARISTO ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 305
Author(s):  
Noe John Joseph Endencio Sacramento
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Political Efficacy ◽  
Openness To Experience ◽  
The Political ◽  
Simple Linear Regression ◽  
R Software ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Independent Variables ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Central Claim

The political engagement of individuals has complexly evolved in a borderless world brought by various developments in technology. This study revisits how various predictors, including personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experience, political efficacy, and online (FB) engagement, influence offline political engagements. Using quantitative techniques, the data gathered from a survey with 120 respondents in Cebu City, Philippines, was analyzed using the R software to generate descriptive statistics, correlation, simple linear regression, and multiple regression. A salient finding shows that the respondents’ level of extraversion, openness to experience, and political efficacy is high, while the level of political engagement is low online and offline. While online (FB) political engagement alone highly predicts offline political engagement behavior, all other independent variables (extraversion, openness to experience, and political efficacy) modeled as one attributes a very low effect towards offline political engagement. The model that includes all predictors have produced significant result that strongly supports this study’s central claim. Further, the study discussed the non-engagement of Cebuanos and commenced with suggestions on how Facebook (FB) can further influence an individual’s political engagements as a social media platform. While the publics’ engagements on political issues are vital to democratic societies, the study stressed social media's crucial influence on safeguarding democracies, human rights, and social justice.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Turnout in Multi-Level Systems

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sona N. Golder ◽  
Ignacio Lago ◽  
André Blais ◽  
Elisabeth Gidengil ◽  
Thomas Gschwend
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Level ◽  
National Elections ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
European Elections ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Different Levels

Voters face different incentives to turn out to vote in one electoral arena versus another. Although turnout is lowest in European elections, it is found that the turnout is only slightly lower in regional than in national elections. Standard accounts suggest that the importance of an election, in terms of the policy-making power of the body to be elected, drives variation in turnout across elections at different levels. This chapter argues that this is only part of the story, and that voter attachment to a particular level also matters. Not all voters feel connected to each electoral arena in the same way. Although for some, their identity and the issues they most care about are linked to politics at the national level, for others, the regional or European level may offer the political community and political issues that most resonate with them.

Materialities of Political Commitment?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fearn
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives

Eschewing historicist certainties, this chapter reassesses the political salience of Alcaeus’ lyric poetry by investigating his literary contribution to sympotic culture. Placing Alcaeus’ politically engaged voices within recent theoretical perspectives on deixis, ecphrasis, and the distinctiveness of lyric as a literary mode, the chapter argues that Alcaeus makes a systematic issue of the question of the accessibility of the contexts gestured towards, and in so doing opens up as an alluring prospect the idea of political engagement through literature. The literary and cultural significance of proverbial statements in Alcaeus is also discussed. Alcaeus’ lyric claims are felt across time and space via their special foregrounding of both material culture and political engagement, through performance and reception.

Democracy in the Plural?

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-35
Author(s):  
Anna Friberg
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The Social ◽  
Concepts Of Democracy ◽  
Positive Concept

The article explores some of the composite concepts of democracy that were used in Sweden, primarily by the Social Democrats during the interwar years. Should these be seen as pluralizations of the collective singular democracy or as something qualitatively new? By showing how these concepts relate to each other and to democracy as a whole, the article argues that they should be considered statements about democracy as one entity, that democracy did not only concern the political sphere, but was generally important throughout the whole of society. The article also examines the Swedish parliamentarians' attitudes toward democracy after the realization of universal suffrage, and argues that democracy was eventually perceived as such a positive concept that opponents of what was labeled democratic reforms had to reformulate the political issues into different words in order to avoid coming across as undemocratic.

Is political engagement by constitutional monarchs compatible with democracy?

2021 ◽  
pp. 205789112199169
Author(s):  
Kana Inata
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Public Approval ◽  
Do So

Constitutional monarchies have proved to be resilient, and some have made substantive political interventions even though their positions are mostly hereditary, without granted constitutional channels to do so. This article examines how constitutional monarchs can influence political affairs and what impact royal intervention can have on politics. I argue that constitutional monarchs affect politics indirectly by influencing the preferences of the public who have de jure power to influence political leaders. The analyses herein show that constitutional monarchs do not indiscriminately intervene in politics, but their decisions to intervene reflect the public’s preferences. First, constitutional monarchs with little public approval become self-restraining and do not attempt to assert their political preferences. Second, they are more likely to intervene in politics when the public is less satisfied about the incumbent government. These findings are illustrated with historical narratives regarding the political involvement of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand in the 2000s.

scholarly journals Europe and/or the UK: Post-Brexit urban and regional development futures – A special issue

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Nick Henry ◽  
Adrian Smith
Keyword(s):  
Regional Development ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Studies ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
Urban And Regional Development ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Political Economic

It was over 25 years ago that European Urban and Regional Studies was launched at a time of epochal change in the composition of the political, economic and social map of Europe. Brexit has been described as an epochal moment – and at such a moment, European Urban and Regional Studies felt it should offer the space for short commentaries on Brexit and its impact on the relationships of place, space and scale across the cultural, economic, social and political maps of the ‘new Europes’. Seeking contributions drawing on the theories, processes and patterns of urban and regional development, the following provides 10 contributions on Europe, the UK and/or their relational geographies in a post-Brexit world. What the drawn-out and highly contested process of Brexit has done for the populace, residents and ex-pats of the UK is to reveal the inordinate ways in which our mental, everyday and legal maps of the regions, nations and places of the UK in Europe are powerful, territorially and rationally inconsistent, downright quirky at times but also intensely unequal. First, as the UK exits the Single Market, the nature of the political imagination needed to create alternatives to the construction of new borders and new divisions, even within a discourse of creating a ‘global Britain’, remains uncertain. European Urban and Regional Studies has always been a journal dedicated to the importance of pan-European scholarly integration and solidarity and we hope that it will continue to intervene in debates over what alternative imaginings to a more closed and introverted future might look like. Second, as the impacts of COVID-19 continue to change in profound ways how we think, work and travel across European space, we will need to find new forms of integration and new forms of engagament in intellectual life and policy development. European Urban and Regional Studies remains commited to forging such forms.

scholarly journals Citizenship Education for Political Engagement: A Systematic Review of Controlled Trials

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Steven Donbavand ◽  
Bryony Hoskins
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Behavioral Change ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Controlled Trials ◽  
Participatory Methods ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Whole School ◽  
Online Engagement

Citizenship Education could play a pivotal role in creating a fairer society in which all groups participate equally in the political progress. But strong causal evidence of which educational techniques work best to create political engagement is lacking. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of controlled trials within the field based on transparent search protocols. It finds 25 studies which use controlled trials to test causal claims between Citizenship Education programs and political engagement outcomes. The studies identified largely confirm accepted ideas, such as the importance of participatory methods, whole school approaches, teacher training, and doubts over whether knowledge alone or online engagement necessarily translate into behavioral change. But the paucity of identified studies also points both to the difficulties of attracting funding for controlled trials which investigate Citizenship Education as a tool for political engagement and real epistemological tensions within the discipline itself.

scholarly journals Chiming In: A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Popular Musicians’ Political Engagement on Twitter

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110190
Author(s):  
Josephine Lukito ◽  
Luis Loya ◽  
Carlos Dávalos ◽  
Jianing Li ◽  
Chau Tong ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Qualitative Case Studies ◽  
Systematic Examination ◽  
Assisted Analysis

While music as an artistic form is well studied, the individuals behind the art receive relatively less attention. In this article, we provide evidence of celebrity advocacy with a systematic examination of musicians’ political engagement on Twitter. This study estimates the extent to which musicians use Twitter for political purposes, with particular attention to whether such engagement varies across music genres. Through a computational-assisted analysis of 2,286,434 tweets, we group 881 musicians into three categories of political engagement on Twitter: not engaged (comprising the majority of artists), circumstantial engagement, and active political engagement. We examine the latter categories in detail with two qualitative case studies. The findings indicate that musicians from different genres have distinct patterns of political engagement. The Christian music genre shows the most engagement as a whole, especially in philanthropy. On the contrary, the most active accounts are rock and hip-hop artists, some of whom discuss political issues and call for mobilization. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

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