When protest humor is not all fun: The ambiguity of humor in the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption grassroots mobilization

This article focuses on the ambiguous ideological work of citizen-produced humor in protest. Using the case of the 2017 Romanian anti-corruption protests as empirical data, the article shows how humor can simultaneously signal grassroots creativity and resistance to power structures, and reproduce conservative gender and class hierarchies. Unlike other types of texts, humor presents itself as an innocent and light message, absolved of the need for critical scrutiny. However, protest studies need to engage in a more nuanced way with the ideological articulation of democratic politics via protest humor by asking not only how humor helps protest communication, but also how it achieves shared enjoyment, for whom, and to what consequences for the ideological articulation of democratic politics. The article concludes by proposing that researcher reflexivity can afford a new sensitivity to the ambiguousness of protest humor.

Prosody and ideology

The focus of this paper is on the role choices in phonological systems (Brazil 1997; Halliday & Greaves 2008) play in the ideological work of a text. Using an instance of news reporting of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, we show how prosodic choices – both those shared with other texts in this register, and those specific to this instance – contribute to the ideological force of the text. The ideological effects of prosodic choices in this text, we argue, include projecting a very particular interpretation of the invasion as if distant and objective, and giving prominence to claims that the invasion was measured and targeted, and by implication in accordance with international law.

In Defense of #blackAF's Celebration of Mediocrity

This article explores how television and film writer-producer Kenya Barris’ Netflix series #blackAF disturbs and seemingly upends Black millennial woke cultural assumptions about the good life. This, I contend - not discounting the valid classist and colourist critiques of the show - is the animus for Black millennial discontent with #blackAF. Specifically, I reveal the hashtags #blackexcellence and #supporteverythingblack to be ideological blankets covering the unfortunate reality of everyday Black life. These hashtags, which do the ideological work of covering over reality, are made unstable and incoherent by #blackAF’s apotheosizing of mediocrity as a grand cultural accomplishment. In one fell swoop #blackAF manages to give the death knell to Cosbyian respectability politics, which have hitherto been operating in the guise of the hashtag #blackexcellence.

Sociolinguists and Rapport

‘Rapport’ in fieldwork involves the temporary interactional suspension of strangerhood and distance. In traditional ethnography, it has positive value as a fieldwork ideal sketched in advisory rules of thumb. But in reflexive contemporary sociolinguistics, rapport looks like a craft term concealing a great deal of ideological work, covering ethnocentricity in gate-keeping encounters and ‘synthetic personalization’ in consumer culture. Can these two traditions be reconciled and if so, how? The paper proposes playback—retrospective participant commentary on recordings of interaction—as a productive reconfiguration of rapport that avoids the bad faith with which rapport is so easily identified.

Analysis on the Phenomenon of Study-Weariness among Chinese Applied Undergraduates

Due to the mutual influence of many factors such as society, schools, teachers, and individual students, there are varying degrees of study weary of students in applied undergraduate universities in China. To solve this problem, it is necessary for authorities to focus on the training goals of applied talents to continue to deepen the reform of applied teaching. Optimizing the structure of the teaching staff through introducing outside, teachers must strive to improve the teaching level and teaching affinity. The daily management of students and ideological work strengthened, students’ confidence and determination to “knowledge changes destiny” need building.