The Tales of Alphanumerical Symbols in Media: The Case of Bitcoin

Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency, has not only given rise to a wave of digital innovations but also stirred up considerable controversy. Some have hailed it as the most significant innovation since the Internet, while others have dismissed it as a Ponzi scheme that should be abandoned and forbidden. Regardless of these varying views, this is an innovation in need of scrutiny. In this paper we present a metastory of Bitcoin, based on an interpretative study of 737 news articles between 2011–2019. Through our analysis, we identified five narratives, including The Dark Side, The Bright Side, The Tulip Mania, The Idea, and The Normality. Our analysis demonstrates the interpretive flexibility of technology as influenced by ideologies, and we construct a theoretical model demonstrating media’s role as constructor and conduit. The metastory provides an institutional look at the broader interpretations of digital innovations as well as the multifaceted nature of digital innovations and how their interpretation evolve over time.

Shaping Migrants as Threats: Multilayered Discretion, Criminalization, and Risk Assessment Tools

This article examines Operation Migrant, initiated by the Norwegian police following the so-called migration crises in Europe in 2015. One of its central aims was, by predicting challenges related to increased migration, to improve resource allocation and prevent crime. By drawing on research on risk and threat assessment as a form of power, this article aims to analyze how risk categories are distributed and translated into a multilayered institutional arrangement where migration is policed as a potential crime. The article examines the indicators that the risk assessments are based on and the measures applied and investigates how discretionary practices make immigrants objects for law enforcement and policing. The article contributes to research on migration control in an ordinary police context, where immigration identity checks become part of the crime reduction strategy. Applying the concept of interpretive flexibility (Collins 1981), I will identify the steps in this chain of translation to explore the leap from targeting potentially criminal asylum seekers to targeting broader groups with temporary residency in Norway. The article analyzes the conditions determining how policing, technologies, and migrants are “co-constructed” in a chain of mediation and translation, which reinforces the view of migrants as risky and criminal. The final section discusses how risk and threat analysis is affected by the notion of the “crimmigrant other” (Franko 2020). In Norway, selectively targeting unwanted migrants as criminals has become dominant in police decision-making at a policy level and everyday practices affecting not only third country nationals but also unwanted eastern Europeans.

Psychosocialization in Nepal: Notes on Translation from the Frontlines Global Mental Health

As ‘psychosocial interventions’ continue to gain traction in the field of global mental health, a growing critical literature problematises their vague definition and attendant susceptibility to appropriation. In this article, I recast this ill-defined quality as interpretive flexibility and explore its role in processes of translation occurring at the frontlines of care in rural Nepal. Drawing from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork among community-based psychosocial counsellors, I consider how the broad and flexible notion of the ‘psychosocial problem’ operates as a ‘boundary object’ in transnational mental health initiatives—that is, how it facilitates the collaboration of service users, clinicians, donors, and policymakers in shared therapeutic projects without necessarily producing agreement among these parties regarding the nature of the suffering they address. I suggest that psychosocial interventions may be gaining popularity not despite but precisely because of the lack of a unitary vision of the problems psychosocial care sets out to alleviate. In closing, I reflect on what distinguishes ‘psychosocialisation’ from medicalisation and highlight the limitations of the latter as a critical paradigm for the anthropology of global mental health.

The Doctrine of al-Walla’ wal-Bara’ in the Salafi-Jihadi Perspective: Flexibility within Rigidity

Salafi-jihadi scholars typically take conservative positions on matters relating to the doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’. Often, their stances are more restrictive than those of non-militant Salafi scholars (known in the academic literature as Taqlidis). However, an analysis of their responses to questions pertaining to the doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ indicates that, under certain circumstances, the Salafi-jihadi scholars exercise an interpretive flexibility that results in more flexible edicts. In general, it appears that in matters with political and/or public implications (such as declaring takfir on a political leader, declaring jihad against apostates, and representing an apostate ruler), the Salafi-jihadis will often express opinions that are inflexible and restrictive. When the matter at hand pertains to personal life, however, even in the case of the doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’, Salafi-jihadis often express opinions that are surprisingly flexible. The detailed explanations that appear in Salafi-jihadi responses indicate that Salafi-jihadi scholars understand the complexity faced by Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies and states and who face uncertainty as to application of the doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ to their day-to-day lives. Accordingly, when responding to practical questions about how such Muslims may function within close personal relationships and/or work environments shared with non-Muslims, Salafi-jihadi scholars tread carefully and attempt to provide creative solutions. In so doing, they skirt the edges of doctrinal interpretation.

Differently Differentiating Gender

Both the Christian and Muslim schools emphasize their boundary from the outside world through their performance of gender. For the Muslim schools, the difference was rooted in actual physical activity, especially how males and females separated from each other, while for the Christian schools, the difference was rooted primarily in what people—especially women—said about their actions. Evangelicals’ history of proclamation means their boundaries take on a different character, formed by opposition to ideas as itself a key practice, over and above the more explicitly bodily practices of gender and sexuality. In contrast, there is more interpretive flexibility for Muslims about gender-related practices. The hijab and gender separation can serve an important double function: they can simultaneously allow patriarchs to believe they are maintaining male dominance while allowing others to believe Muslim women are maintaining these practices for entirely different reasons.

Energy efficiency in Norwegian news media

This article investigates how energy efficiency features in Norwegian news media discourse. Based on an analysis of 309 news articles, we explore the objectification of energy efficiency and its rhetorical connections to energy savings and reductions. Energy efficiency is surrounded by positive overtones and used flexibly to include different meanings as well as effects. As a discursive object, the term wields significant rhetorical and legitimizing power, producing consensus across conflicting narratives and controversies in what we call the “discourse-as-usual”. We argue that energy efficiency shares characteristics with boundary objects, conveying an interpretive flexibility to bridge otherwise incommensurable perspectives on the need to decrease or increase absolute energy consumption. However, there are a few instances where controversy turns toward energy efficiency itself, revealing different views on absolute limits to energy consumption. By scrutinizing one of these glitches in consensus, we examine the normal through the anomaly to pinpoint the moral prerogative of energy efficiency in the discourse-as-usual. By black-boxing the complex relationship between efficiency and reductions, the term allows for avoiding the question of absolute limits to energy consumption in news media debates. Rather than translate between climate change and economic stability and growth narratives, we assert that energy efficiency as a discursive object conceals opposition between them. We discuss this concealment as a form of system dependency, as it is by black-boxing the effects of energy efficiency that it can unite adversaries and ensure ongoing activity.

Coauthorality

Chapter 5 introduces the idea of actuating to argue that once spectators are actuated, they can shift into states of being coauthorial, or coauthorality. Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ theory of the “death of the author,” in which he relocates the authority for making meaning of a text from author to reader, this chapter ties into larger debates concerning coauthorship and the embodied participation of audiences in immersive performance. It is argued that choreographic structures compound spectators’ perceptions of coauthorship for two reasons: spectators’ direct physical engagement in improvisational scores and the interpretive flexibility of dance itself. In immersive productions, dance provides opportunities for audiences to conceive of their participation as generating and coauthoring content that contributes to the production.

From Ephemeral Events to Multiple Legacies: An International Comparison of Festival Demarcations and Management Approaches

Festivals have come to play an important role in tourism and managing their legacy has become an important challenge for governments and the events industry. Festivals typically take place over limited periods of time, but they also bring longer lasting legacies for the economy, local communities, and the environment. Festival legacies are characterized by interpretive flexibility; they are interpreted differently by various actors. This complicates attempts to adapt the management of festivals in such a way that aspired legacies are realized and unwanted (negative) legacies minimized. This article elicits the recursive relationship between the ways in which event legacies are socially constructed, and how events are managed. Building on constructivist approaches to governance and management and drawing on the empirical variety of six cultural festivals in different parts of Europe, this contribution shows how event legacy can be unpacked along actors' diverse cognitive, social, temporal, and spatial demarcations, and how these understandings relate to particular repertoires of management and governance. Highlighting how event legacies are pursued through combinations of control-oriented project management and more broadly scoped process management approaches, the study concludes with strategic reflections on the possibilities for elevating ephemeral events into vehicles for social change.

Green transformation is a boundary object: An analysis of conceptualisation of transformation in Norwegian primary industries

The concept of green transformation is burgeoning in the academic literature and policy discourses, yet few empirical studies investigate what the concept actually means to diverse actors, and how it manifests in practices. This paper contributes to filling that gap. Through an analysis of policy documents and interviews, we investigate how central policy actors and interest organisations in Norwegian farming, fisheries and aquaculture conceptualise and enact transformation. The analysis of the policy documents shows that the concept ‘transformation’ is mentioned more frequently, and a rhetoric with close connotations to green growth is increasingly applied, which may leave the impression that there is consensus concerning what the concept means and entails. The interviews however leave a more nuanced picture. Among most of the actors, transformation is interpreted in terms of green growth, while a minority of the actors argue for a deeper sustainability, pointing to planetary limits. Clearly, what transformation is and what it entails is embedded in interpretive flexibility. The concept ‘transformation’ is plastic enough to be applied in several different, and partly conflicting, policy discourses and arenas. We argue that transformation can be understood as a boundary object, and different actors perform different sorts of boundary work to adapt the boundary object of ‘transformation’ to fit their agendas. Thus, it makes more sense to think of transformation in plural – transformations – instead of a single, consensual discourse. We find that the very practices of most of the actors are not transformative in the theoretical understanding of the concept and that inadequate attention is given to potential negative sides of transformation. Consequently, both scholarly and practical discussions on how to achieve transformation should take into account that different and (partly) conflicting interpretations will continue to exist and contribute to distinguish between different degrees of sustainability and related pathways.