The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen

Sound positions individuals as social subjects. The presence of human beings, animals, objects, or technologies reverberates into the spaces we inhabit and produces distinct soundscapes that render social practices, group associations, and socio-cultural tensions audible. The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen unites interdisciplinary perspectives on the social dimensions of sound in audiovisual and literary environments. The essays in the collection discuss soundtracks for shared values, group membership, and collective agency, and engage with the subversive functions of sound and sonic forms of resistance in American literature, film, and TV.

Black Lives Matter goes global: Connective action meets cultural hybridity in Brazil, India, and Japan

This study examines the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter (BLM) as digitally networked connective action. Combining social network analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we show that BLM was hybridized in different ways to give voice to local struggles for social justice in Brazil, India, and Japan. However, BLM’s hybridization stirred right-wing backlash within these countries that not only targeted local movements but BLM too. Theoretically, we argue that both transnational contiguities and intra-cultural tensions shape the construction of meanings—or “action frames”—as connective action crosses cultural borders. Resonant frames, which are in harmony with the values of the movement, amplify the features of the global movement that resonate with local concerns or hybridize it with a local struggle. Reactionary frames, which are hostile to movement values, may also target the global movement or its hybridization. We theorize the different roles of global and local crowd-enabled elites in transnational connective action.

Domestic violence in the UK Zimbabwean diaspora

Political instability in Zimbabwe since the late 1990s resulted in a swelling of Zimbabwean political asylum seekers in the UK. Living in a developed liberal democracy may challenge traditional intimate relationship norms for both husbands and wives. A snowball sample of 30 interviews were conducted over a period of six months in 2019 with participants from Zimbabweans living on mainland UK. Our thematic analysis highlights how domestic violence predicates on cultural tensions in traditional patriarchal and liberal influences. Victims/survivors report difficulties disclosing the violence and discrimination by peers. Our findings have important implications for domestic violence interventions and those wanting to support victims.

The Oxford Handbook Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World

This work presents current approaches and new avenues of enquiry into ancient sport and spectacle. It discusses historical perspectives, contest forms, contest-related texts, civic and social aspects, and use and meaning of the individual body. Greek and Roman topics are interwoven under each heading to simulate contest-like tensions and complementarities, juxtaposing, for example, violence in Greek athletics and in Roman gladiatorial events, Greek and Roman chariot events, architectural frameworks for contests and games in the two cultures, and contrasting views of religion, bodily regimens, and judicial classification related to both cultures. It examines the social contexts of games, namely the evolution of sport and spectacle diachronically and geographically across cultural and political boundaries, and how games are adapted to multiple contexts and multiple purposes, reinforcing, for example, social hierarchies, performing shared values, and playing out deep cultural tensions. The work also pays some attention to other directing forces in the ancient Mediterranean (e.g. Bronze Age Egypt and the Near East; Etruria; and early Christianity). The volume addresses important themes common to antiquity and modern society, such as issues of class, gender, health, and the popular culture of the modern Olympics, and gladiators in cinema. It presents contests and spectacles as venues of connection and as opportunities for the negotiation of status and the exchange of value, broadly for example how early panhellenic sanctuaries responded to economic stakeholders, and how groups and individuals in the later Roman empire forged social and political links through the circus events.

Overview and Approaches

The aims, scope, structure and cultural background of the present volume are outlined here. It aims to present progressive current thought in the field and indicate directions for future work. It also juxtaposes Greek and Roman games and spectacle, to shed light on similarities and differences in the two cultures, and also to suggest parallels in other cultures, including our own. It aims to facilitate research and provoke thinking in particular aspects of Greek sport and Roman spectacle. The focus of the collection is to an extent in the social contexts of games, namely the evolution of sport and spectacle diachronically and geographically across cultural and political boundaries, and how games are adapted to multiple contexts and multiple purposes, reinforcing, for example, social hierarchies, performing shared values, and playing out deep cultural tensions. This chapter also interrogates the terms for sport today and in antiquity, and presents the high value placed on sport by ‘following the money’ in both eras.

Angels and Anchoritic Culture in Late Medieval England

This book examines vernacular and Latin anchoritic writings in England (c.1170–1400) as these participated within late medieval negotiations between the distinct, and at times divergent, cultures of religious reform and spiritual charisma. It argues that admonitory (or regulatory), devotional, and hagiographic works composed for anchorites transmit, together with their intertexts, the urgent need within orthodox culture to manage the various and potentially unruly spiritualities so often associated with late medieval charismatics, including anchorites. So too, this study traces through the images of embodiment and angelic mediation a set of religious and cultural tensions around the efforts by religious (esp. clerical, monastic, and mendicant) elites to align individual and charismatic gifts (1 Cor. 12:8–11) with the widespread calls for obedience and submission to church authorities. This masculine suspicion of spiritual gifts was strategically framed within a discourse about (and in defence of) the clerical, Eucharistic, and ecclesial body, often in reaction against the increasingly acute threat of religious dissent. Related to these developments were the dominant narratives of corporate unity that marshaled images of angels—at once the messengers of charismatic power and the celestial associates of orthodox culture—as well as the Pauline text on angelic transfiguration (2 Cor. 11:14) to articulate major challenges at the level of institutional authority and spiritual power. Underwriting the fragile boundary between heresy and orthodoxy, mainstream figurations of charisma and the angelic image worked on behalf of a culture of reform and/as transformation in its efforts to secure the clerical and ecclesial body from corruption and falsification.

Therapeutic virtual reality in prison: Participatory design with incarcerated women

Upon release from prison, women face barriers in every step of their journey home, with most reentry services designed for men. With virtual reality (VR) headsets increasingly affordable and normalized as a mental health treatment modality, VR is being adopted by prisons around the United States. We argue that the risks and affordances of VR in this political context necessitate centering those with lived experience as creative agents to avoid designing media that re-traumatizes, reduces the complexities of reentry, and reproduces oppressive prisoner–guard dynamics. This article documents and analyzes the design process of a VR reentry program for a state prison to help incarcerated women practice responding to high-stress reentry situations, prior to their release. The resulting VR prototype draws on therapeutic VR work but takes a community-based participatory design approach. We conclude by discussing the institutional and cultural tensions of implementing a participatory design process in a US state prison system.

Menggelorakan makna energik sebagai brandscape erigo melalui iklan fireflies

Local brands in Indonesia today are growing and competitive and in this competition, various appropriate marketing communication strategies are needed, where this is needed to build attention from potential consumers. One of the local brands from Indonesia is Erigo, a company that has recently been discussed by internet users because one of its marketing strategies is to place advertisements in Time Square, New York. Advertising is one of the digital marketing strategies that serves to attract the attention of potential consumers through information on products and services offered to stick in the minds of consumers. Through a qualitative approach with an interpretive paradigm using Laura R. Oswald's marketing semiotics method, it was found that through the short advertisement "Fireflies", Erigo wanted to show the target audience and their target market, young people or millennials, to have enthusiasm, motivation and belief. high self-esteem in exploring their curiosity, one of which can be done by real action from their energetic nature. This energetic nature becomes an ideology (cultural categories) that Erigo wants to convey to its target market, which are young people who aim to convey an invitation to dare to explore new things to find hope and identity related to exploratory (cultural tensions). Exploratory is meant here is a sense of freedom (emotional territories) where this is necessary for them to inflame the energetic they have.

Ghost Homes

‘Ghost Homes’ explores the evolving sense of community in a village in rural West Wales, deeply affected by the pandemic. It looks critically at the linguistic and cultural tensions between English holidaymakers and Welsh inhabitants. Using Welsh-English code-switching, it tells the story of a mother and son on the outskirts of Cardigan, navigating illness alongside the isolating pressures of lockdown, highlighting the limitations as well as support of ‘community’. Welsh-speaking Judy is alone at the height of the pandemic, suffering from debilitating back pain. She relies on her middle-aged son, Will, with whom she has a strained relationship. The short story shows the fragile nature of ‘community’ in rural places, especially in West Wales where seaside villages have been bought up as second homes for wealthy English families and, during the pandemic, became ghost towns for the few (often elderly) individuals who continued to live there.