The Acting Class and the Myths of Meritocracy

Our feature documentary The Acting Class (2017) is here contextualised in the context of a critique of the cultural industries as part of the ideology of meritocracy and a resurgence of work around class in the sociology of culture. The Acting Class focuses on the question of class stratification in the UK acting industry. We here review our research on this issue and contextualise it within the scholarly literature on diversity and inequality, the creative industries and the broader reconfigurations of the political economy of British capitalism. We also discuss the importance of the interview in creative practice research as a way of democratising knowledge production and socialising experience.

Cumulative Dis/Advantage, Structure, and Change: Three New Directions in CDA Research

Over the past several decades, evidence for cumulative dis/advantage as a regular feature of cohort aging has continued to cumulate, while new questions concerning the underlying dynamics continue to emerge. This paper reviews the accumulated knowledge base, and focused on three recently emerging lines of inquiry that hold great promise for expanding more fully our understanding of CDA processes: 1) the intersection of class stratification and race in the operation of CDA processes, 2) factors accounting for cross-national variations, and 3) the intersection of robust intracohort processed that generate cda with intercohort processes and the impact of historical and social change. These three new directions are briefly discussed.

Cumulative Dis/Advantege, Structure, and Change: Three New Directions for CDA Research

Over the past several decades, evidence for cumulative dis/advantage as a regular feature of cohort aging has continued to cumulate, while new questions concerning the underlying dynamics continue to emerge. This paper reviews the accumulated knowledge base, and focused on three recently emerging lines of inquiry that hold great promise for expanding more fully our understanding of CDA processes: 1) the intersection of class stratification and race in the operation of CDA processes, 2) factors accounting for cross-national variations, and 3) the intersection of robust intracohort processed that generate cda with intercohort processes and the impact of historical and social change. These three new directions are briefly discussed.

Women’s Voices and Patriarchal Hegemony of the Edo Period in Shinju Tenno Amijima (1720)

The Edo Period (1603-1868), known as the feudal era, lasted for nearly three centuries in Japan. Confucian teachings applied in all sectors of life had a great influence on the expansion of the patriarchal system in Japanese society at this time. Under the strict control of the Tokugawa shogunate government, the implementation of social class stratification was firmly established, including in the hierarchical relationship between men and women. The period of peace that occurred throughout the Edo period had contributed to a conducive situation for the rapid development of Japanese culture. Male artists were very dominant in the development of Japanese culture, and they were centred in big cities during this period. On the other hand, this era had become a dark age for women who did not get the opportunity to speak and create as men did. The female figures of the Edo period were presented in the works of male writers. This study focuses on examining women’s voices in the works of these male writers in the period. After exploring research on this period’s literary works, we found that these studies have various focuses related to the disclosure of women during the period, starting from the representation of women, their relationship with a male and other female characters, to their roles and positions. This research will contribute to discussions on gender, history, and literature, as well as on the way women's voices in this work serve a purpose in supporting the patriarchal hegemony that occurred in the period. We aim to reveal women’s voices in a male writer's play Shinju Tenno Amijima (1720) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725) through a feminist critique approach. To explain women's voice and patriarchal hegemony, we apply the concepts of silence from Olsen (2003) and hegemony from Antonio Gramsci. The results of this study indicate that women’s voices raised in this play are the ones who support men's interests and are subject to patriarchal values. This play consistently displays the exclusion of women's voices of opposition and defiance. This work also shows its existence as a locus for the dominant values emphasized for women in the Edo period.

Predicting brain amyloid-β PET phenotypes with graph convolutional networks based on functional MRI and multi-level functional connectivity

The detection of amyloid-β (Aβ) deposition in the brain provides crucial evidence in the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the efficiency of the current PET-based brain Aβ examination suffers from both coarse, visual inspection-based bi-class stratification and high scanning cost and risks. In this work, we explored the feasibility of using non-invasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to predict Aβ-PET phenotypes in the AD continuum with graph learning on brain networks. First, three whole-brain Aβ-PET phenotypes were identified through clustering and their association with clinical phenotypes were investigated. Second, both conventional and high-order functional connectivity (FC) networks were constructed using resting-state fMRI and the network topological architectures were learned with graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to predict such Aβ-PET phenotypes. The experiment of Aβ-PET phenotype prediction on 258 samples from the AD continuum showed that our algorithm achieved a high fMRI-to-PET prediction accuracy (78.8%). The results demonstrated the existence of distinguishable brain Aβ deposition phenotypes in the AD continuum and the feasibility of using artificial intelligence and non-invasive brain imaging technique to approximate PET-based evaluations. It can be a promising technique for high-throughput screening of AD with less costs and restrictions.

A platform for underclass youth: Hanmai rap videos, social class, and surveillance on Chinese social media

With increasing influence on everyday social interactions and cultural practices, social media platforms do not just represent but also profoundly reproduce various forms of social inequalities. This essay investigates what role social media have played in the emergence of an underclass habitus among Chinese youth. By focusing on the rise and fall of a participatory hanmai culture on Kuaishou, an underclass-centric social media platform in China, the study identifies social media platforms as key actors in restructuring power relations. Chinese social media platforms, particularly Kuaishou, produce contemporary relationships of power by simultaneously incorporating algorithm design, profit-seeking strategies, underclass users’ expressions, and state surveillance. The overall effect is to mediate, regulate and buttress social inequalities in the process of sustaining Chinese class stratification. This analysis necessarily problematizes and debunks the myth of technological neutrality claimed by social media platforms. The result is that Chinese underclass youth (individual and unexpected acts of human agency aside) are routinely subjected to and reproduced through the logic of both capitalist accumulation and state authoritarianism via their participation on these social media platforms.

‘The Soviet Problem’ in Post-Soviet Russian Marxism, or the Afterlife of the USSR

The present article deals with different Marxist theories on the Soviet experience, which emerged in post-Soviet Russophone Marxist or neo-Marxist scholarship (concurrently with some reference to Marxist traditions in other former Eastern Bloc countries). The article demonstrates that these theories – if we leave the remaining ‘Marxist-Leninists’ of the classical Soviet type aside and focus on critical, post-Soviet Marxism – may be classified as either ‘fundamentally rejectionist’ or ‘Thermidorian’. The former, in line with the seminal criticisms of K. Kautsky and other early opponents of Lenin, reject the socialist nature of the October 1917 Revolution outright. The latter mostly define the Revolution as at least socialist-oriented, but further bifurcate into different varieties of the ‘state capitalism’ thesis with a number of theorists defining Stalinist societies as special varieties of post-revolutionary industrialism essentially different from orthodox capitalism. Most critical post-Soviet Marxists agree, however, that the main vector of Soviet-type regimes’ evolution indeed pointed towards increased class stratification. However, it should be remembered that Soviet-type bureaucracy was a class-in-the-making rather than a class-in-itself or a class-for-itself, and this point is further elaborated in the works of those theorists who prioritise the differences rather than similarities between Soviet-type industrialism and orthodox capitalism.

Class Incorporated: Stratified Patterns of Academic Engagement at a Highly Selective University

This research examines the influence of social class stratification on students’ self-reported academic engagement. Drawing from 44 interviews with students from the three major class groups at an elite university, we show how social class patterns academic engagement. We analyze academic engagement along the following four domains: strategies for academic achievement, beliefs in personal ability, connections to academics, and the alignments between academic activities and career plans (Wang and Castenada-Sound, 2008). Counterintuitively, compared to both upper class and students from the lower class, middle-class students reported the lowest levels of academic engagement. We discuss possible explanations for these non-linear findings. We conclude by recommending that our traditional conceptions of academic engagement need to take social class into account, and further, that policy makers consider scaffolding for all non-upper class students within elite spaces.