Trailer Park Boys and the Promotional Cultures of Cannabis in Canada: Audiences, Influencers, and Imminent Commodities

While Canada, like most other nation states, has adopted various aspects of neoliberalism, the recent Cannabis Act presents ideological tensions and practical concerns given its advertising and promotional restrictions. Given the rise of neoliberalism within the dominant social, economic, and cultural system of consumer capitalism, it seems contradictory for the Canadian state to develop legislation that creates (or at least, legalizes) a new market wherein advertising and promotions (i.e., the driving forces of consumer capitalism) are effectively made absent. This article identifies and interrogates the existing tensions and contradictions between the Cannabis Act and the promotional cultures of consumer capitalism, as well as the ways in which the Trailer Park Boys (TPB) “brand” and performers (as promotional intermediaries) have attempted to circumvent the existing promotional restrictions. Beginning with a review of the existing literature regarding relevant theoretical perspectives and key concepts, the article provides a brief overview of the Cannabis Act, its promotional restrictions, and the exemptions and legal loopholes thereof. Finally, in presenting and engaging with a case study, this article concludes that the TPB brand has, effectively, circumvented the Cannabis Act’s existing restrictions and subsequently become a multi-platform promotional intermediary.

Language ideologies of emerging institutional frameworks of Mapudungun revitalization in contemporary Chile: nation, Facebook, and the moon of Pandora

This article is a succinct approach to Mapudungun language ideologies and their development within the political and economic context of 21st century Chile. Social media have empowered Mapudungun language activists and intellectuals and helped them create digital communities, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, from which they establish and promote language policies, defined by themselves. Among the most relevant language ideologies found in the corpus, there is a representation of Indigenous languages as sacred, or untouchable, often implying an essential connection between Indigenous cultures and the natural or spiritual world. This representation (called “cosmovisionism” by activists) tends to contradict modernizing language ideologies that circulate in emerging Mapudungun language planning, mainly due to the influence of Basque and Catalan models based on the notion of language normalization, actively promoted in Chile by agents from those domains. Modernizing visions of Mapudungun tend to be linked to a nationalist political project that demands a solid connection between land, people, history, cultural identity, and language. This leads to ideological tensions between the urgency to anonymize and the need to depoliticize the language, both simultaneously considered fundamental to secure Mapudungun’s expansion.

Gentes igual que tú y que yo: los textos de Rosario Castellanos en los contrasentidos ideológicos de la política lingüística indigenista

In this article we analyze documents written by Rosario Castellanos during the years that she worked as a scriptwriter for the puppet plays in the Highlands of Chiapas. These plays were part of educational campaigns aimed at the Tsotsil and Tseltal Maya population. We show that the discourses circulating during the years in which indigenous politics was being constructed were permeated by opposing and contradictory ideological tensions, tensions that were reflected in the proposal and use of categories of identification of the population and their languages, in the theoretical objectives and ideals and in the participants’ personal and collective stories.

Uncovering the Mitigating Psychological Response to Monitoring Technologies: Police Body Cameras Not Only Constrain but Also Depolarize

Despite organizational psychologists’ long-standing caution against monitoring (citing its reduction in employee autonomy and thus effectiveness), many organizations continue to use it, often with no detriment to performance and with strong support, not protest, from employees. We argue that a critical step to resolving this anomaly is revisiting researchers’ fundamental assumptions about access to gathered data. Whereas previous research assumes that access resides nearly exclusively with supervisors and other evaluators, technological advances have enabled employee access. We hypothesize that with employee access, the psychological effects of monitoring may be far more complex than previously acknowledged. Whereas multiparty access may still decrease employee autonomy, it may also trigger an important psychological benefit: alleviating employees’ perceptions of polarization—the increasing social and ideological divergence between themselves and their evaluators. Access gives employees unprecedented opportunities to use the “objective” footage to show others their perspective, address evaluators’ erroneous assumptions and stereotypes, and otherwise defuse ideological tensions. Lower perceived polarization, in turn, attenuates the negative effects that low autonomy would otherwise have on employee effectiveness. We find support for these hypotheses across three field studies conducted in the law enforcement context, which has been a trailblazer in using technological advances to grant broad access to multiple parties, including employees. Overall, our studies shed light on the conflicting (and ultimately more innocuous) impact of monitoring and encourage scholars to break from prior approaches to account for its increasing egalitarianism.

Cultural Pitfalls in Islamic Subtitling

This research explores the challenges of translating cultural references in Islamic TV programs from Arabic into English. Subtitling is a constrained type of translation due to the space and time limitations on the screen. Apart from this challenge, the subtitler has to deal with cultural pitfalls that cannot be separated from a stormy global background that includes political and ideological tensions between the Muslim World and the West. This study investigates these difficulties, attempts to suggest solutions to them and identify the basic qualifications of competent subtitlers of this kind of programs. The ultimate purpose is to help establish healthy communication between Muslim and Western countries through translation which is an act of cultural mediation. To achieve this, three real-life examples and their subtitles have been selected from Iqraa TV programs and analyzed using Christiane Nord’s functional model. Results show three types of cultural pitfalls typical of Islamic TV programs, i. e., Qur’anic allusions, Sunnah allusions and politicized issues. Instrumental translation has been found to be effective in overcoming these cultural pitfalls, while documentary translation proved to be ineffective due to the space limitations and its lack of clarity. Creativity, flexibility, and cultural sensitivity are indispensable for the subtitler to bridge the communication gaps between the source and target cultures.

Huawei, China, and Ideological Tensions in the 5G Telecommunications Platforms

While the COVID 19 pandemic has captured the attention of the geo-political agenda throughout 2020, pushing the Huawei controversy off the front pages of the news, the hysteria and suspicions around Huawei providing their lower cost telecommunications equipment to Western nations reached new crescendos in the move towards 5G communication platforms. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the recent series of escalating tensions between Huawei and Western nations. While there was a first run of tension with the 4G networks, it was to be repeated with the preparations for the 5G telecommunications platforms. Alongside this expansion was the parallel development of geo-political tensions between China and Western powers. This included ongoing tensions over the South China Sea, Taiwan's relationship with China, the Hong Kong issue, the trade war with the United States, and general diplomacy between China and the West. The chapter seeks to provide the likely result on how these tensions would be resolved.

“Very Nearly an Armful!”: British Post-War Comedy and the NHS

While much has been written on post war British film and television comedy, there has been no critical focus on one of its key sub-genres – the medical comedy. This article aims to fill (at least some) of the gap in this scholarship. It chooses to focus on how several key medical comedies engaged the politics and ideological tensions of the fledgling National Health Service from the late 1950s to the 1980s. It will focus on the microcosmic representation of medical architectures and environments and consider how they provide spaces for political and ideological debate.

Sex and Desire in Eileen Chang’s “Red Rose, White Rose”

Eileen Chang’s novella “Red Rose, White Rose” presents a love triangle between one man and two women, who struggle in the turbulent 1940s, a radically transitional period in China. The traditional lifestyle and morality upheld by the Chinese public for several generations were challenged by the importation of foreign civilization, a process accompanied by military and ideological tensions. Drawing upon the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, this article argues that the three main characters in the novella have difficulty in gratifying their multiple desires, which results from the crumbling of the old order represented by China’s traditional mindset defended by seniors, and from the absence of a reliable new order to be largely formulated in line with Western models. In this transitional age which confuses and suffocates the young Chinese generation, education fails to fulfill its role as a bridge connecting Chinese tradition and Western modernity, and it fails to emancipate young people – and females in particular – from an outdated mentality and lifestyle.