Greek teenagers’ cultural taste and identity expression through a documentary-making project

This article explores a film education project conducted on an extra-curricular after-school basis in a Greek secondary school in Tampouria, Piraeus. A documentary-making project exploring the area around the school was realized by a group of ten 15-year-old students under the supervision of their English teacher/researcher. The following case study explores how aspects of the students’ cultural taste and identity were expressed through this moving image literacy project, carried out in a foreign language. Various forms of data – observation, textual and audiovisual – are analysed within a social semiotic framework. The article seeks to demonstrate how the students’ cultural taste was formed by different kinds of global and local influences, and how aspects of their multifaceted identities were revealed during the documentary-making process, and expressed through the creation of media texts within a context of Greek education.

Language, Power, Media

Media language is a prototype of the public consent for the media to be defined through compromise as a fourth position in the paradigm of power as a philosophical category, whose explications before the media are legislative, executive, judicial. The linguistic norm and the cognitive-rhetorical characteristic of the media discourse are the prototype of the metaphor of the "fourth power". The formation of the information-language culture and the preservation of the language norm is the high social responsibility of the media discourse. The media is a prototype of public consciousness, a “picture” of national identity – a unit of political and socio-economic information and cultural “taste” (a sample of art and its list).

Genius and taste: Sara Danius’ couture gowns as extended power dressing

The visual politics of fashion has again become a topic of interest to scholars working both inside and outside the realm of fashion studies, although many, like this author, actually bow to Jennifer Craik’s ground-breaking study The Face of Fashion (1994). This article introduces the notion extended power dressing as a way to further the scholarly study of contemporary female executives’ brand of power dressing in the aftermath of John T. Molloy’s 1980s matrix for successful ‘wardrobe-engineering’. In line with previous studies of the sartorial dress code represented by women in power, this article features a pertinent example from yet another social arena, in the form of the unprecedented couture gowns worn by the late permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, at the Nobel Festivities in Stockholm between 2015 and 2018. The author suggests that these frocks are materialized visions of Danius’ intellectual wit and cultural taste, thus representing a visual articulation of her powerful rank. An important characteristic pertaining to Danius’ extended power dressing is therefore that her situated dress practice, while advocating different practices of resistance and counterconduct, refuted all sexualization of her as a female subject to the benefit of a selfauthored and self-reflecting enfashioning technology. By detailing the intellectual process behind Danius’ gowns, as well as their performance in society, this study shows how power is behaving and how it is structured when comparing the conduct of a certain dominant discourse (in this case cultural tradition and misogyny) to the author’s proposed counter-discourse (resistance and female agency). The author suggests that the visual politics emerging from this meeting represent a unique female subculture adding yet another layer to the visual politics of fashion.

Artistic Taste-Making at the Sharjah Biennial

This poster investigates the role that the Sharjah Biennial (SB), an international art showcase in the United Arab Emirates, plays in the development of a local artistic and cultural taste. It argues that the SB contributes to the molding of local aesthetic values through its selection of curatorial themes, artists, artworks, and, especially, venues. Using field visits, interviews, and archival research informed by sociological and anthropological theories on aesthetics, the author shows that organizers of public art exhibitions and programs are in a key position to shape the art to which people are exposed and how this, in turn, creates a public valuation of aesthetics. This project fills a gap in contemporary biennial literature by shedding light on the pivotal roles of art events in shaping societal aesthetic values.

The Moral Project of Childhood

The Moral Project of Childhood argues and demonstrates that fundamental problems stemming from a growing acceptance of children’s moral, spiritual, intellectual, and behavioral pliability drive the assembly of a contemporary “moral architecture” of childhood from extensive maternal responsibility coupled with the increasingly hegemonic presence and existence of child subjecthood. Drawing on materials published in periodicals intended for women and mothers from the 1830s to the 1930s, the book examines how mothers—and, later, commercial actors—found themselves compelled to consider children’s interiorities: their perspectives, needs, wants, pleasures, and pains. In this process, the child’s subjectivity progressively, albeit unevenly, arises as a form of authority in a variety of contexts, including discourses about Christian motherhood, the elements of cultural taste, and the discipline and punishment of children, as well as in machinations about play and toys, questions of children’s property rights, and the uses of money by and for children. The book considers the Protestant origins of the child consumer—a somewhat unlikely pairing—and makes visible and relevant the prefigurative elements and rhetorics from which the child consumer emerges as a contemporary, dominant, and normative ideal.

The slippery slope of cultural non-participation: Orientations of participation among the potentially passive

Research on cultural practices has highlighted the rise of different cultural consumption patterns that challenge the classic theories on class-based hierarchies. However, most scholarly work has focused on active, rather than passive, cultural consumers. This article aims to fill that gap by exploring the orientations of cultural participation of hypothetically passive cultural consumers in contemporary Finland. Existing research proves that culturally non-active groups are difficult to reach through quantitative methods, so this project will draw on qualitative data: 40 individual interviews on everyday life, cultural taste, knowledge and participation with a theoretical sample of people whose background profiles statistically predict cultural non-participation. This article finds three main orientations of participation, expressed as attitudes on different kinds of cultural practices and symbolic boundaries drawn – these orientations of participation are the social-mundane, the cultural-legitimate and the introvert-hostile. It is argued that while none of the orientations equals to cultural non-participation, the latter orientation stands out from the other two as drawing symbolic boundaries upward, highlighting that cultural participation remains a highly stratified and polarized field, also in an egalitarian society.

Ice Dancing to Arirang in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games: The Intersection of Music, Identity, and Sport

This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk song Arirang at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The authors argue that music and sport can be understood as a semiological system that shapes non-Whites’ ideological belief system. In addition, this essay engages with a discussion of cultural classification that often racializes skaters of color as the aforementioned are informed by Orientalism.

Apuleius's Platonism

Lucius Apuleius (c. 125–after 170 ce), of the North African city Madaura, was a Roman philosophical writer of the 2nd century ce. Apuleius’s identity is thrown into an interesting light by his notorious description of the narrator of his comic novel Metamorphoses, perhaps his most famous work, as a relative of Sextus of Chaeronea, who, in turn, was a relation of the Middle Platonist Plutarch. It is possible that this reference indicates merely an intellectual affiliation with Sextus and the Platonic school. From Apuleius’s Florida, a collection of epideictic orations, we learn that he undertook philosophical studies, broadly construed, during a sojourn in Athens that lasted several years and that may have been spent in the intellectual vicinity of the Middle Platonist Calvenus Taurus. Apuleius is thus commonly grouped with the Middle Platonists (see also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Middle Platonism” for a general discussion and various Greek and Roman representatives), a label that has become rather problematic, since it appears to streamline intellectual currents of Platonism that have been shown to vary significantly. Alternative terms, such as “post-Hellenistic” philosophy, have been suggested, but the term “Middle Platonism” is still widely used, with the caveat, however, that it ought to refer to a chronological timeframe, roughly the 1st century bce until Plotinus, rather than a homogenous philosophical outlook. The most conspicuous element in Apuleius’s own philosophical output is a rather complex demonology, designed to ensure that divine providential care permeates the entire cosmos. Other features of his writings are what may be regarded as trademark attributes of his time: a tendency to fit Plato’s thought into a digestible, handbook-style system, instead of practicing critical inquiry or exegesis; a religious interpretation of philosophical doctrine, no doubt informed by his close affiliation with various mystery cults contemporary with him; and an emphasis on rhetoric as a suitable means of conveying philosophical wisdom, a feature in line with the literary and cultural taste of the Second Sophistic. Reluctance to accept Apuleius’s standing as a philosopher is a modern phenomenon. He was held in high esteem for his role as a Platonic philosopher already during his lifetime, and St. Augustine would later single him out, in Book 8 of his City of God against the Pagans, as one of the noblest disciples of Plato—a description that is then followed, it is true, by a devastating critique of Apuleius’s doctrine on demons.