An ‘Organ of Student Opinion’? Alternative Print, Protest, and the Politics of Education in Salient, 1973-1989

<p>This thesis explores Victoria University of Wellington’s student newspaper, Salient, in the 1970s and 1980s. Salient covered a wide array of issues, performing its role as a campus newspaper while closely engaging with and informing students of wider political issues during a period of significant student protest. As a publication, it consistently and deliberately set itself apart from the mainstream media, a position which placed it alongside other alternative or radical publications. Furthermore, the thesis demonstrates that the connections between Salient and the Wellington Marxist-Leninist Organisation (MILO) were profound and enduring in the 1970s, with significant implications for the kinds of analysis and issues that Salient presented to its readers. While individual editors did have unique editorial policies, the nature of Salient’s journalism in the 1970s was notably socialist and activist in its outlook. In the 1980s, while Salient maintained a progressive political outlook, the direct association with MILO (by then the Workers’ Communist League) loosened. The paper’s political content still covered a range of contemporary social issues, and its editors took political stances, but its content was more akin to political commentary than an extension of political activism. The exception was Salient’s opposition to user pays tertiary education, which was seriously considered by David Lange’s Labour Government as part of its neoliberal reforms. As the possibility of a user-pays tertiary education system became more likely, Salient dedicated more space to covering, opposing, and organising action against this disruptive policy which had major implications for its student readership. Salient often did not speak for all students, but provided a platform for alternative analysis of social and political issues, pushing the boundaries of the purpose of student media and its place within the print landscape of New Zealand.</p>

An ‘Organ of Student Opinion’? Alternative Print, Protest, and the Politics of Education in Salient, 1973-1989

<p>This thesis explores Victoria University of Wellington’s student newspaper, Salient, in the 1970s and 1980s. Salient covered a wide array of issues, performing its role as a campus newspaper while closely engaging with and informing students of wider political issues during a period of significant student protest. As a publication, it consistently and deliberately set itself apart from the mainstream media, a position which placed it alongside other alternative or radical publications. Furthermore, the thesis demonstrates that the connections between Salient and the Wellington Marxist-Leninist Organisation (MILO) were profound and enduring in the 1970s, with significant implications for the kinds of analysis and issues that Salient presented to its readers. While individual editors did have unique editorial policies, the nature of Salient’s journalism in the 1970s was notably socialist and activist in its outlook. In the 1980s, while Salient maintained a progressive political outlook, the direct association with MILO (by then the Workers’ Communist League) loosened. The paper’s political content still covered a range of contemporary social issues, and its editors took political stances, but its content was more akin to political commentary than an extension of political activism. The exception was Salient’s opposition to user pays tertiary education, which was seriously considered by David Lange’s Labour Government as part of its neoliberal reforms. As the possibility of a user-pays tertiary education system became more likely, Salient dedicated more space to covering, opposing, and organising action against this disruptive policy which had major implications for its student readership. Salient often did not speak for all students, but provided a platform for alternative analysis of social and political issues, pushing the boundaries of the purpose of student media and its place within the print landscape of New Zealand.</p>

Public Health Guidance and Research Strategies to Combat the Next COVID Pandemic

COVID-19 has severely disrupted the lives of many with respect to health, economic security, and social behaviors. By analyzing the U.S. response to COVID-19, strategies for dealing with the next pandemic can be established. Analyses on the politicization of science reveal the ineffectiveness of political commentary in overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, as seen through heterogenous behavioral patterns throughout the U.S. in regard to pandemic prevention measures, such as social distancing. Economic data reveal the importance of financially prioritizing small businesses over large ones and how to ensure individuals are motivated to return to work. The mask mandate was not widely respected throughout the U.S. and was a primary reason for the pandemic's prolonged effects. Due to a lack of trust in the leading health experts, non-pharmaceutical prevention methods were not as effective as they could have been. By analyzing vaccine data, it is clear that pharmaceuticals can and should be developed prior to the next pandemic. Based on the principle of cross-immunity, vaccines that incorporate genomic similarities between virus groups can be researched and administered, which will theoretically reduce the immune system’s reaction to the next novel virus. Overall, the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic had effective and ineffective components. By studying public health procedures and results from this pandemic, recommendations can be made to improve the response to the next pandemic.

Fashion

Fashion is perhaps the ultimate decadent medium: fashionable dress has been critiqued by moralists for extravagance, luxury, and sexual licentiousness since classical times. This chapter focuses on fashion since the Industrial Revolution, when mass textile production and the rapid dissemination of Parisian styles across Europe and America enabled the development of a rapidly changing fashion system. It shows how, within emergent modernity, decadent dress was characterized by its embrace of artifice; this reached its apotheosis in dandyism and the cult of extraordinary individuality, whereby sartorial expression is used to make the body into a work of art. The chapter examines the gendering of decadent fashion and the figure of the female dandy; and finally appraises the contemporary fashion industry’s embrace of beauty in decay. It concludes that far from an evacuation of moral responsibility, the decadence of fashion may be a means of astute political commentary.

“MISS RONA IS REALLY CLAPPING THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS”: BLACK TWITTER'S POLITICAL HUMOR IN COVID-19 TIMES

As has been widely reported, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately sickened and killed Black Americans. At the same time, however, there is a significant body of conversation on Black Twitter that jokes about the pandemic. This includes tweets that nickname the pandemic as "Miss Rona,” as in “god i need a drink so bad, miss rona i promise i will be good.” Through an analysis of tweets using the “Miss Rona” nickname, we examine how Black Twitter humor serves as a site of political critique of both public policy failures and the Trump administration more broadly, with users leveraging practices like Signifyin’, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and wordplay to resist legibility by outsiders as they orient toward their own community. Black humor is political commentary that resonates with the Black community because the tweets address or refer to Black trauma during the pandemic: dealing with continued racial violence, white supremacist ideology, and medical disparities based on race. The tweets are also expressions of Black Twitter catharsis (joy despite pain) through witty one-sided Twitter banters that skillfully and playfully engage with several facets of the social and political climate. We consider how these conversations go beyond laughing to keep from crying to coded political statements and cultural alliance, and argue that Black Twitter’s jokes about the collective trauma of COVID-19 is a resource for online camaraderie, cultural critique, and community affiliation.

Reviving democracy: Creating pathways out of legitimacy crises

Over the last several years, democratic citizens and theorists have been grappling with an upsurge in political commentary on the crisis and decline of democratic legitimacy around the world. Increasingly, theoretical attention is turning from the philosophical justification of ambitious moral ideals of democracy, to the interpretation of potentials within existing political practice for democratic renewal and repair. This review article examines three new books at the forefront of this theoretical turn towards engagement with the real-world political dynamics of democratic crisis and revival: Open Democracy by Hélène Landemore; Hope for Democracy by John Gastil and Katherine Knobloch; and Mending Democracy by Carolyn Hendriks, Selen Ercan and John Boswell. It begins by surveying the new contributions of these books – highlighting the importance all attribute to creative political agency as a source of revival in democratic practice. It then discusses several questions left unresolved by these books – concerning the problem of democratic legitimacy, the normativity of democratic standards and the power dynamics undergirding democratic agency – which jointly mark out an important agenda for future theoretical work on pathways out of democratic crisis.

SymptomSpeak: Women’s Struggle for History and Health in Kosovo

What are the linguistic dimensions of pain, and what kind of articulations arise from these painful experiences? How does the language of pain circulate, connect, and reach across histories, gendered realities, and social politics? In what ways might the language of pain act on and transform the world by shaping and changing socio-political agendas? I explored these questions among women in Kosovo and discovered a unique symptomatic language which I call SymptomSpeak. SymptomSpeak is a powerful language evoked, shared, and exchanged by women to articulate political, social, and economic grievances, to challenge societal norms, and to demand justice. The language itself consists of a detailed symptom vocabulary which is variously assembled into meaning complexes. Such assemblages shift depending on the social context in which they are conveyed and are referred to as nervoz (nervousness), mërzitna (worried, sad), mzysh (evil eye), and t’bone (spell). I describe in detail how women variously combine and exchange components of SymptomSpeak and, thereby, question dominant framings of reality. Thereby, my intention is to contribute to a new understanding of pain as language which straddles the fine line between socio-political commentary and illness; produces gendered political realities; and challenges the status quo through its communicative power.

Réalismes déclinistes du polar français contemporain : Nicolas Mathieu, Colin Niel, Antonin Varenne

The detective novel has long been described as a form of “authentic” realistic literature (Collovald et Neveu). However, this article analyzes how three contemporary French crime novels—Aux animaux la guerre by Nicolas Mathieu (2014), Seules les bêtes by Colin Niel (2017) and Battues by Antonin Varenne (2015)—challenge and reappropriate conventions of realism. The three country noir novels follow in the lineage of two important traditions of realism, nineteenth-century French classical realism (Dubois) and the social realism of the 1970s and 1980s “néo-polar” (Desnain). Yet rather than anchoring the novels in familiar territory, the authors blur topographical references, create a polyphonic narrative structure and set a horrific tone to provide symbolic and political commentary. The novels thus borrow from magic realism to depict a declining rural and working-class world.

The Debate about the definition of the Mexican Violent Conflict: towards a useful concept

Since 2007, scholars and the general public have tried to understand the nature ofthe increasingly violent conflict in Mexico. As a result, many different concepts, andcharacterisations about the violence in Mexico have arisen, but many of these, eitherborrowed from many fields of literature terms or new concepts, fall short to classify or explain the key differences from high scale violence involving organised crime and other types of violent conflicts such as civil wars. Also, considering the regional trend of high homicide rates in Latin America, especially in Central America and Brazil, it is relevant to build a new concept that can be useful, theoretically, and empirically, for the study of violence and conflict derived from involvement of organised crime, gangs, and other nonstate actors. In this article I review most of the academic and political commentary of the nature of the Mexican case and, from there, I analyse the different concepts proposed from two angles: first, a comparison with the characteristics of other high scale violent conflict concepts, and second, an examination of their utility in terms of theory, field studies, internal coherence, parsimony, familiarity, depth, differentiation, and familiarity. The aim of the comparison of different types of conflict is to assess how scholars use the literature from diverse fields to influence categorisation of new violent phenomenon. The examination of utility aims is to establish how these comparisons help or not to study of violence in Mexico and other Latin America cases of high scale violence of non-political conflicts, and how characterisations and evidence collected can enhance the understanding of violence with thebbuilding of a useful concept of this phenomenon.

Fatal Adulteries: Sexual Politics in the English Revolution

This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.