Spectacles of Settler Colonial Memory: Archaeological Findings from an Early Twentieth-Century “First” Settlement Pageant and Other Commemorative Terrain in New England

In 1923, rural New England mill town Dover, New Hampshire, staged a Tercentenary pageant of extraordinary proportions to celebrate its “first” settlement. This public spectacle memorialized a specific, and deeply exclusionary, narrative of English settler colonialism, shaped by social anxieties of the post-First World War United States. Recent archaeological research has found possible remnants from this spectacle on a seventeenth-century site. In disturbing this site, the Tercentenary pageant appears to have disregarded actual significant material traces from the very era it aimed to memorialize--traces that offer distinct, fuller understandings of deeply nuanced Native-settler interactions in the Piscataqua River region. Dover’s pageant is situated in a regional analysis of Native and Euro-colonial commemorative place-making of the early twentieth century, exploring how different communities pursued multivocal, monovocal, or other approaches in their performative engagements with the seventeenth century.

The Potential of Video Game Streaming as Exposure Therapy for Social Anxiety

Social anxiety is a prevalent problem that affects many people with varying severity; digital exposure therapy-which involves controlled exposure to simulations of feared social situations alongside cognitive restructuring-can help treat patients with anxieties. However, the need to personalize exposure scenarios and simulate audiences are barriers to treating social anxieties through digital exposure. In this paper, we propose game streaming as an exposure therapy paradigm for social anxiety, supporting it with data from two studies. We first propose a framework describing requirements for exposure therapy and how game streaming can fulfill them. We select demand and performance visibility from these characteristics to showcase how to manipulate them for experiences of gradual exposure. With Study 1, we provide evidence for these characteristics and support for the framework by showing that a game's demand affected expected fear of streaming games. In Study 2, we show that the prospect of streaming led to elevated fear, a necessary property for effective exposure therapy. Further, we show that the effect of streaming on expected fear was similar for participants who can be considered socially anxious. These findings provide evidence for the essential effect of exposure therapy, which serves as a first step towards the validation of streaming as a social anxiety treatment. Our paper provides an initial, important step towards a novel, broadly applicable, and widely accessible digital approach for the treatment of social anxiety.

Servants of Francophilia: French Migrant Women as Governesses in the Bohemian Lands, between Cultural Transmission and Reproduction of Social Distinction (1750–1810)

This article shows empirical and conceptual possibilities of exploring the transcultural roles and economic situations of French migrant women who served as governesses in the noble circles of the Habsburg monarchy. It combines various research methods, employing narrative textual analysis, socioeconomic and material culture approaches, and cultural exchange perspectives. The author uses printed librettos and comparative insights to reveal broader social anxieties connected with governesses who crossed multiple borders in terms of geography, culture, language, class, and the gender order. She also draws attention to inheritance tax–related sources as evidence of these women's economic conditions. Finally, the author outlines the major shifts in attitudes toward the French language and French immigrants and shows how these affected the governesses’ labor market.

Anticipating the Postwar World

Social anxieties about the war and about what it was doing to the country permeated America. What would happen when the war was over? The plays at the end of the war ask what kind of country the United States will be after the war is won, what form postwar democracy will take, and what the county's relationship with the rest of the world what will be. Taken together, the plays produced near and just after the end of the war spend little time celebrating the Allies' victory. Rather, they look at the challenges that returning servicemen will face in trying to reestablish family relationships and trying to heal from psychological wounds. They look at the difficulties families will face when their serviceman doesn't return home. They look at how those on the home front have had to remake their lives in ways that the returning serviceman will have trouble recognizing. They look at how old prejudices will create new social divisions as black and Jewish servicemen return home. They look at how selfish special interests, political naivete, and sheer love of power may undermine the democratic cause for which the nation had fought the war. While much of the country's popular culture was ringing victory bells, along Broadway, many playwrights were sounding alarms.

Flights of fancy: creating and communicating the elite travel experience

This major research paper (MRP) explores the discourses of elite airline travel by applying principles of travel discourse, linguistics, and social identity theory to a case study of Delta Air Lines’ online marketing for its premium Delta Sky Club lounge. The following research questions guided this study: How does Delta Air Lines’ language use in the online marketing of their frequent-flyer and business-class services contribute to the creation of a Club motif? How does the Club motif help to differentiate the elite traveler (and their travel experience) from other ticketholders? How does it reinforce the salience of these groups? How does the loyalty and- reward framework capitalize on social anxieties about status and group identification? A qualitative analysis was used to analyze the spaces, status groups, and social structures that were featured on the five webpages selected from Delta Air Lines’ corporate website. The results of this study not only contribute to our understanding of the travel experience for ‘preferred’ airline passengers, but also reveal the discursive strategies by which these passengers are stylized and positioned as elites.

Flights of fancy: creating and communicating the elite travel experience

This major research paper (MRP) explores the discourses of elite airline travel by applying principles of travel discourse, linguistics, and social identity theory to a case study of Delta Air Lines’ online marketing for its premium Delta Sky Club lounge. The following research questions guided this study: How does Delta Air Lines’ language use in the online marketing of their frequent-flyer and business-class services contribute to the creation of a Club motif? How does the Club motif help to differentiate the elite traveler (and their travel experience) from other ticketholders? How does it reinforce the salience of these groups? How does the loyalty and- reward framework capitalize on social anxieties about status and group identification? A qualitative analysis was used to analyze the spaces, status groups, and social structures that were featured on the five webpages selected from Delta Air Lines’ corporate website. The results of this study not only contribute to our understanding of the travel experience for ‘preferred’ airline passengers, but also reveal the discursive strategies by which these passengers are stylized and positioned as elites.

Bureaucratic Emotionalities: Managing Files, Forms, and Delays in the Canadian Spousal Reunification Process

Based on an ethnographic study of Canadian women’s intimate relationships with a racialized man from the Global South, this article focuses on their experiences of the spousal reunification process. More specifically, I examine how the women emotionally and materially engage with spousal reunification procedures and administrative temporalities and how interactions with the Canadian immigration bureaucracy affect their subjectivity as women and citizens. I look at three embodied modes of involvement with bureaucratic procedures—waiting, working and fighting—each bringing forth its own set of emotions and creative coping strategies. I argue that love is central to the experience of the administrative procedures, as an ideological and technological tool used both by the state to regulate and discredit non-desirable relationships and by applicants to make sense of their position (of vulnerability) and to create meaningful narratives within state-imposed categories. A form of defensive agency emerges in women whose enormous application files, filled with “proof” of the authenticity of their relationship, shows how they have endorsed social anxieties about North-South intimacies and the strategies they have developed in order to legitimize their union.

The Cyclic Self: Menstrual Cycle Tracking as Body Politics

Tracking in/fertility—through ovulation biosensing, menstrual and perimenopausal apps, and ovarian reserve testing—is becoming increasingly commonplace amongst relatively privileged women in the Global North. Taking place on and through platforms comprised of devices, bodies, and discourses, such self-tracking articulates forms of in/fertility and reproductive futures that are, we argue, closely entwined with emerging forms of biomedical capitalization. While reproductive medicine focused on the creation of children has been entwined with corporate interests since the development of in vitro fertilization in the 1980s, fertility as an asset, or future value, is increasingly targeted by the new innovation sectors as a specific capacity, separable from reproduction per se, in which women should invest if they are not to fall prey to incipient infertility. Synthesizing our separate empirical work in this field, this paper theorizes the connections between the emergence of self-tracking logics and cultures, the burgeoning of consumer-oriented, clinical services, and contemporary social anxieties around fertility decline. Even in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, where birth rates are stable, (some) women’s fertility is being refigured as precious and vulnerable, something to be tracked, documented, and attended to in the name of individual future happiness and fulfilment. Women with enough financial and cultural capital are encouraged to monitor their periods, come to know their ovulation patterns, and become aware of their ovarian reserve, and, importantly, to act prudently on such knowledge to safeguard their reproductive futures.

Incipient Infertility: Tracking Eggs and Ovulation Across the Life Course

Tracking in/fertility—through ovulation biosensing, menstrual and perimenopausal apps, and ovarian reserve testing—is becoming increasingly commonplace amongst relatively privileged women in the Global North. Taking place on and through platforms comprised of devices, bodies, and discourses, such self-tracking articulates forms of in/fertility and reproductive futures that are, we argue, closely entwined with emerging forms of biomedical capitalization. While reproductive medicine focused on the creation of children has been entwined with corporate interests since the development of in vitro fertilization in the 1980s, fertility as an asset, or future value, is increasingly targeted by the new innovation sectors as a specific capacity, separable from reproduction per se, in which women should invest if they are not to fall prey to incipient infertility. Synthesizing our separate empirical work in this field, this paper theorizes the connections between the emergence of self-tracking logics and cultures, the burgeoning of consumer-oriented, clinical services, and contemporary social anxieties around fertility decline. Even in countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom, where birth rates are stable, (some) women’s fertility is being refigured as precious and vulnerable, something to be tracked, documented, and attended to in the name of individual future happiness and fulfilment. Women with enough financial and cultural capital are encouraged to monitor their periods, come to know their ovulation patterns, and become aware of their ovarian reserve, and, importantly, to act prudently on such knowledge to safeguard their reproductive futures.

‘Not Music but Sonic Porn’: Identity Politics, Social Reform, and the Negative Reception of Jazz

The 1920s fascination with jazz music and dance provoked deep concern and anxiety about the future direction of society in different corners of the world. Jazz was readily associated with various social evils that were considered a threat to the cultural and moral wellbeing of nations as well as the mental and physical health of both individuals and society in general. Negative reception of jazz was not limited to the United States but seems to have expanded around the globe just as rapidly as the appeal of the music and movements loosely identified at the time as jazz. The article identifies defining elements of this negative discourse to explore their mechanism and bearings in particular localized settings, namely, in Australia and Iceland. The focus is on how the perceptions of jazz as a social evil contributed to conceptualizing ideas of social reform and how the demonization of jazz played a role in defining national character and culture. Australia and Iceland serve as examples for understanding the way in which the negative discourse gained a foothold in society by relating to pre-existing social anxieties, political objectives and historical context.