Alternative Communities

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Owen Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Communities

scholarly journals Virtual Sense of Community in a World of Warcraft® Storytelling Open Forum Thread

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean Anthony Fabi Gui
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Virtual Community ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
World Of Warcraft ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
New Members ◽  
Alternative Communities ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Role Playing Game

World of Warcraft® (WoW), a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) extends to its members a virtual landscape of live gaming opportunities through such platforms as “dice” rolled character stats, open-ended story development, and interactive AI. These affordances are underpinned by a kind of virtual sense of community bringing players together in order to develop relationships and the self, adventure together, build up wealth, and overcome obstacles in order to complete quests. In addition to live game-play (or “in-world”) communities, WoW residents create alternative communities through rich online forums—here, new members are recruited into guilds, disputes are spawned and slayed, and seasoned warriors reminisce over worlds and lives that once- were. However, a third type of community is also evident through particular threads crafted within forums specifically for collaborative storytelling (or roleplaying). This paper examines sense of community—a sense of “belonging to, importance of, and identification with a community”—through one particular thread, “The Darkening Grove Tavern” under the forum World’s End Tavern using an adaptation of McMillan and Chavis’ theory and Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor’s ethnographic data collection methodology for qualitative analysis of virtual worlds . Findings from players’ story text (or “turns”) suggest that online storytelling forum threads exhibit a linguistically and semiotically branded sense of virtual community. 

scholarly journals Urban Societies in Europe since 1945: Toward a Historical Interpretation

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
MORITZ FÖLLMER ◽  
MARK B. SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Alternative Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Eastern And Western Europe ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

How can we write the history of urban societies in Europe after 1945? This article offers an interpretative overview of key developments in both Eastern and Western Europe, while also discussing some key conceptual issues. Along the way, it takes stock of the relevant historiography (much of which is very recent) and introduces a selection of papers from a cycle of three international workshops held between 2011 and 2013. The papers range geographically from Britain to the Soviet Union and cover topics as diverse as post-war reconstruction and alternative communities in the 1970s. Their respective approaches are informed by an interest in the way societies have been imagined in discourses and reshaped in spatial settings. Moreover, the papers move beyond case studies, urban history's classic genre, and can therefore facilitate synthetic reflection. It is our hope that, in so doing, we can make urban history more relevant to contemporary European historians in general.

scholarly journals Helen Southworth. Fresca. A Life in the Making. A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. R21-R24
Author(s):  
Heleen Van Duijn
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Choral Conductor ◽  
Conscientious Objectors ◽  
Alternative Communities ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Hogarth Press ◽  
Fictional Autobiography

The subject of Southworth’s book is Francesca (Fresca) Allinson (1902–1945), a puppeteer, choral conductor, writer and creator of folksongs, whose life was cut short by drowning. She grew up in a gifted and thoroughly non-conformist family. Her brother Adrian, a painter, studied at the Slade school. Her father worked as a doctor at his practice in London, obtaining and practising his own unorthodox convictions about hygiene and diet. As a radical pacifist Fresca helped provide alternative communities for conscientious objectors (COs). Her fictional autobiography A Childhood was published in 1937, by the Hogarth Press, the publishing house of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-Adult-Child Events in Children's Literature Research

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-201
Author(s):  
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Adult Child ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Utopian Literature ◽  
Literature Research ◽  
School Year ◽  
Alternative Communities

As Nathalie op de Beeck (2018) has recently pointed out, children's literature scholars need to forge more meaningful connexions between ecoliteracy and environmental action to create possibilities for achieving environmental justice. I propose that we achieve this goal by (auto-)deconstructing our research practices and subjectivities through promoting the participation of children as active contributors to all elements of the research process. Such approaches enable young decision-makers to engage with one another, with books and with the world through ethics of interconnectivity. I see such praxis as exemplifying deconstructive events and discuss their emergence in Shaping a Preferable Future: Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternative Communities and Times (ChildAct), a project I co-conducted with children in Cambridgeshire, UK, in the school year 2017–2018. The project centered on child-adult collaboration towards a better understanding of how utopian literature shapes ideas for preferred futures, how these ideas evolve in readers’ encounters with their localities and how they call readers into action. As I show, ChildAct testifies to the possibility of de-centering children's literature research towards a field promoting a shared sense of belonging to and responsibility for our world.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document