Introduction: The Question Concerning Technology and Romanticism

Author(s):  
Mark Coeckelbergh

The introduction explains that the main argument and narrative of this book is that technology and romanticism are not in opposition to each other. The literature of the philosophy of technology lacks attention to the relationship between romanticism and technology; conversely, in related fields like cultural studies, sociology, and media studies, there is much literature about this relationship and its history. This book focuses on specific and contemporary technologies and critically examines its own arguments. The book also discusses how to move past romanticism, while acknowledging that the means of analysis are informed by Romanticism. It is comprised of three parts which discuss the traditional opposition between technology and romanticism, the complex relationship between them, and the ways to move beyond romantic and machine thinking.

Author(s):  
Ned O'Gorman

Media technologies are at the heart of media studies in communication and critical cultural studies. They have been studied in too many ways to count and from a wide variety of perspectives. Yet fundamental questions about media technologies—their nature, their scope, their power, and their place within larger social, historical, and cultural processes—are often approached by communication and critical cultural scholars only indirectly. A survey of 20th- and 21st-century approaches to media technologies shows communication and critical cultural scholars working from, for, or against “deterministic” accounts of the relationship between media technologies and social life through “social constructivist” understandings to “networked” accounts where media technologies are seen embedding and embedded within socio-material structures, practices, and processes. Recent work on algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and platforms, together with their manifestations in the products and services of monopolistic corporations like Facebook and Google, has led to new concerns about the totalizing power of digital media over culture and society.


EMPIRISMA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Limas Dodi

According to Abdulaziz Sachedina, the main argument of religious pluralism in the Qur’an based on the relationship between private belief (personal) and public projection of Islam in society. By regarding to private faith, the Qur’an being noninterventionist (for example, all forms of human authority should not be disturb the inner beliefs of individuals). While the public projection of faith, the Qur’an attitude based on the principle of coexistence. There is the willingness of the dominant race provide the freedom for people of other faiths with their own rules. Rules could shape how to run their affairs and to live side by side with the Muslims. Thus, based on the principle that the people of Indonesia are Muslim majority, it should be a mirror of a societie’s recognizion, respects and execution of religious pluralism. Abdul Aziz Sachedina called for Muslims to rediscover the moral concerns of public Islam in peace. The call for peace seemed to indicate that the existence of increasingly weakened in the religious sense of the Muslims and hence need to be reaffi rmed. Sachedina also like to emphasize that the position of peace in Islam is parallel with a variety of other doctrines, such as: prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and so on. Sachedina also tried to show the argument that the common view among religious groups is only one religion and traditions of other false and worthless. “Antipluralist” argument comes amid the reality of human religious differences. Keywords: Theology, Pluralism, Abdulaziz Sachedina


SPIEL ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-185
Author(s):  
Marcus S. Kleiner

The article discusses the relationship between popular cultures, pop cultures and popular media cultures as transformative educational cultures. For this purpose, these three cultural formations are related to the themes of culture, everyday life, society, education, narration, experience and present. Apart from a few exceptions, such as in youth sociological works on cinema and education, in the context of media literacy discussions or in dealing with media education, educational dimensions of popular cultures and pop cultures have generally not been the focus of attention in media and cultural studies.


Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou

The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.


Author(s):  
Rónán McDermott ◽  
Pat Gibbons ◽  
Dalmas Ochieng ◽  
Charles Owuor Olungah ◽  
Desire Mpanje

AbstractWhile scholarship suggests that improving tenure security and housing significantly reduces disaster risk at the household level within urban settings, this assertion has not been adequately tested. Tenure security can be conceived as being composed of three interrelated and overlapping forms: tenure security as determined by legal systems; de facto tenure security; and tenure security as perceived by residents. This article traces the relationship between tenure security, the quality of housing, and disaster risk on the basis of a mixed methods comparative case study of the settlements of Kawangware and Kibera in Nairobi. Although the findings suggest that owner-occupancy is associated with the structural integrity of dwellings to a greater extent than tenantship, no association was found between the length of occupancy by households and the structural integrity of the dwelling. Moreover, tenantship is not found to be closely associated with fires and flooding affecting the dwelling as extant scholarship would suggest. Formal ownership is linked with greater investment and upgrading of property with significant implications for disaster risk. Our findings highlight the complex relationship between tenure security and disaster risk in urban informal settlements and provide impetus for further investigation.


Foods ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 1570
Author(s):  
Charles Spence

This narrative review examines the complex relationship that exists between the presence of specific configurations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in food and drink products and multisensory flavour perception. Advances in gas chromatography technology and mass spectrometry data analysis mean that it is easier than ever before to identify the unique chemical profile of a particular food or beverage item. Importantly, however, there is simply no one-to-one mapping between the presence of specific VOCs and the flavours that are perceived by the consumer. While the profile of VOCs in a particular product undoubtedly does tightly constrain the space of possible flavour experiences that a taster is likely to have, the gustatory and trigeminal components (i.e., sapid elements) in foods and beverages can also play a significant role in determining the actual flavour experience. Genetic differences add further variation to the range of multisensory flavour experiences that may be elicited by a given configuration of VOCs, while an individual’s prior tasting history has been shown to determine congruency relations (between olfaction and gustation) that, in turn, modulate the degree of oral referral, and ultimately flavour pleasantness, in the case of familiar foods and beverages.


Author(s):  
Anthony Shay ◽  
Barbara Sellers-Young

Ethnic groups have been defined as people who share a common ethos based on ancestry, nation, language and other identity markers. This volume brings scholars from across the globe that have incorporated perspectives from critical and cultural studies in an investigation of what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented as an ethnicity. The essays in this volume engage the four themes of identity construction, local and transnational politics, appropriation and related exotification, and resistance that are part of the ongoing discourse in the relationship between dance and ethnicity. Cumulatively, the essays in their research approach and methodology document the change that has taken place in dance studies from the ethnic as an easily identified category based on biology and geography to ethnicity as a fluid concept and dance as an active contributor to the creation and negotiation of it.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (8) ◽  
pp. 1151-1166
Author(s):  
Andrew Duffy

Bypassing the dominant Western bias in journalism scholarship is a challenge; it raises the question of what might replace it. Similarly, to evade the Western post-imperialism orthodoxies recurrent in cultural studies scholarship into travel and tourism would require other perspectives. This study combines the two and attempts to circumvent the Western bias in scholarship on travel journalism, given that its constituent parts are – for different reasons – becoming de-centred from the West. Textual analysis of Singaporean newspaper articles in Mandarin and English shows that questions of privilege and power remain but need not be associated with narratives of post-imperialism. Instead, destinations are textually constructed to justify the writer’s decision to travel. The intention for this article is to suggest ways that dominant Western perspectives in media studies may be balanced by other viewpoints which still expose issues of power and privilege but offer a less hegemonic, more culturally neutral starting point


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly

This is the introduction to a special number of French Cultural Studies devoted to religion in France, focusing on the issues of belief, identity and laïcité. The articles deal with social and cultural issues of secularity and identity, and also reach into philosophical argument and literary representation. They explore the relationship between France and Islam, issues of Jewish and Catholic heritage, the philosophical issues of belief and non-belief, and the historical roots of French secularism and the search for ways of living together.


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