5,385 research outputs found
An American Knightmare: Joker, Fandom, and Malicious Movie Meaning-Making
This monograph concerns the long-standing communication problem of how individuals can identify and resist the influence of unethical public speakers. Scholarship on the issue of what Socrates & Plato called the âEvil Loverâ â i.e., the ill-intended rhetor â began with the Greek philosophers, but has carried into [post]Modern anxieties. For instance, the study of Nazi propaganda machines, and the rhetoric of Hitler himself, rejuvenated interest in the study of speech and communication in the U.S. and Europe. Whereas unscrupulous sophists used lectures and legal forums, and Hitler used a microphone, contemporary Evil Lovers primarily draw on new, internet-related tools to share their malicious influence. These new tools of influence are both more far-reaching and more subtle than the traditional practices of listening to a designated speaker appearing at an overtly political event. Rhetorician Ashley Hinck has recently noted the ways that popular culture â communication about texts which are commonly accessible and shared â are now significant sites through which citizens learn moral and political values. Accordingly, the talk of internet influencers who interpret popular texts for other fans has the potential to constitute strong persuasive power regarding ethics and civic responsibility.
The present work identifies and responds to a particular case example of popular culture text that has been recently, and frequently, leveraged in moral and civic discourses: Todd Phillipsâ Joker. Specifically, this study takes a hermeneutic approach to understanding responses, especially those explicitly invoking political ideology, to Joker as a method of examining civic meaning-making. A special emphasis is placed on the online film criticisms of Joker from white nationalist movie fans, who clearly exemplify ways that media responses can be leveraged by unethical speakers (i.e., Evil Lovers) and subtly diffused. The study conveys that these racist movie fans can embed values related to âtrolling,â incelism, and xenophobia into otherwise seemingly innocuous talk about film. While the sharing of such speech does not immediately mean its positive reception, this kind of communication yet constitutes a new and understudied attack on democratic values such as justice and equity. The case of white nationalist movie fan film criticism therefore reflects a particular brand of communicative strategy for contemporary Evil Lovers in communicating unethical messages under the covert guise of mundane movie talk
Serving to secure "Global Korea": Gender, mobility, and flight attendant labor migrants
This dissertation is an ethnography of mobility and modernity in contemporary South Korea (the Republic of Korea) following neoliberal restructuring precipitated by the Asian Financial Crisis (1997). It focuses on how comparative âservice,â âsecurity,â and âsafetyâ fashioned âGlobal Koreaâ: an ongoing state-sponsored project aimed at promoting the economic, political, and cultural maturation of South Korea from a once notoriously inhospitable, âbackwardâ country (hujinâguk) to a now welcoming, âadvanced countryâ (sĆnjinâguk). Through physical embodiments of the culturally-specific idiom of âsuperiorâ service (sĆbisĆ), I argue that aspiring, current, and former Korean flight attendants have driven the production and maintenance of this national project.
More broadly, as a driver of this national project, this occupation has emerged out of the countryâs own aspirational flights from an earlier history of authoritarian rule, labor violence, and xenophobia. Against the backdrop of the Korean stateâs aggressive neoliberal restructuring, globalization efforts, and current âHell Chosunâ (HelchosĆn) economy, a group of largely academically and/or class disadvantaged young women have been able secure individualized modes of pleasure, self-fulfillment, and class advancement via what I deem âservice mobilities.â Service mobilities refers to the participation of mostly women in a traditionally devalued but growing sector of the global labor market, the âpink collarâ economy centered around âfeminineâ care labor. Korean female flight attendants share labor skills resembling those of other foreign labor migrants (chiefly from the âGlobal Southâ), who perform care work deemed less desirable. Yet, Korean female flight attendants elude the stigmatizing, classed, and racialized category of âlabor migrant.â Moreover, within the context of South Koreaâs unique history of rapid modernization, the flight attendant occupation also commands considerable social prestige.
Based on ethnographic and archival research on aspiring, current, and former Korean flight attendants, this dissertation asks how these unique care laborers negotiate a metaphorical and literal series of sustained border crossings and inspections between Korean flight attendantsâ contingent status as lowly care-laboring migrants, on the one hand, and ostensibly glamorous, globetrotting elites, on the other. This study contends the following: first, the flight attendant occupation in South Korea represents new politics of pleasure and pain in contemporary East Asia. Second, Korean female flight attendantsâ enactments of soft, sanitized, and glamorous (hwaryĆhada) service help to purify South Koreaâs less savory past. In so doing, Korean flight attendants reconstitute the historical role of female laborers as burden bearers and caretakers of the Korean state.U of I OnlyAuthor submitted a 2-year U of I restriction extension request
The Palaces of Comfort, Consolation and Distraction - The Pie and Mash shop as a performative space of a contested London working class memory
This thesis seeks to interrogate and clarify the history and culture of Londonâs traditional but fading and largely forgotten eel, pie and mash shops. In doing so the work examines their cultural conduit, the adjacent and evolving identity of the cockney whose contested memoryscapes have, I suggest, great contemporary political and cultural relevance in an age of populism and Brexit.
The work excavates a tracing around the shopsâ absences in historical literature. It situates their establishment within the dying breath of an older, popular street culture and the birth of a new London working class, centred around unofficial street markets and in a synchronous dance with the ideological accession of the bourgeoisie.
The thesis employs the biological notion of a taxon to illustrate the shopsâ evolution largely defined by the class-demotion of their clientele that mirrored the changing cartography of the city. By the late nineteenth century, this work argues, the eel and pie shops had become a pillar of a respectable London working class culture whose hyper-local solidarities revolved around micro-class divisions of work and negotiated bourgeois codes of propriety as part of a âculture of consolationâ that has remained largely impenetrable to outsiders.
The study explores this concomitant cockney identity which became, partly through bourgeois theatrical ventriloquising, a figure of imperial incorporation. This eventually came to represent a particular type of âordinarinessâ, subsequently reconfigured around the gains of a Welfare State and a national economy that continues to be periodically valorised according its usefulness to capital at times of political stress.
Utilising sensory ethnography and memory studies the work explores the landscape and territoriality of the contemporary eel, pie and mash shop. It interrogates the rituals and complex, often competing and polyphonic memory inscriptions which memorialise a largely post-colonial nostalgic melancholia around the loss of fantasy of a British omnipotence. The thesis argues that the shops and their simulacra-like reincarnations amongst the cockney diaspora in the Essex new towns offer an insight into the changing notions of taste and class within the convivialities of a unique but broadly closed heritage of proletarian culture as a zone of resistance in the neoliberal city
Internet of Vehicles and Real-Time Optimization Algorithms: Concepts for Vehicle Networking in Smart Cities
Achieving sustainable freight transport and citizensâ mobility operations in modern cities are becoming critical issues for many governments. By analyzing big data streams generated through IoT devices, city planners now have the possibility to optimize traffic and mobility patterns. IoT combined with innovative transport concepts as well as emerging mobility modes (e.g., ridesharing and carsharing) constitute a new paradigm in sustainable and optimized traffic operations in smart cities. Still, these are highly dynamic scenarios, which are also subject to a high uncertainty degree. Hence, factors such as real-time optimization and re-optimization of routes, stochastic travel times, and evolving customersâ requirements and traffic status also have to be considered. This paper discusses the main challenges associated with Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and vehicle networking scenarios, identifies the underlying optimization problems that need to be solved in real time, and proposes an approach to combine the use of IoV with parallelization approaches. To this aim, agile optimization and distributed machine learning are envisaged as the best candidate algorithms to develop efficient transport and mobility systems
Bilateral Climate Governance in Indonesia
As a global issue, climate change has emerged as one of the most challenging problems faced by the international community. The failure of multilateral climate agreements, including the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Agreement of 2015, has put multilateralism in peril. Due to the problems with multilateralism, bilateralism has appeared as an alternative approach to climate governance.
Since 1997, Indonesia has become a strategic partner for seven major bilateral donors aiming to tackle climate change (DNPI, 2009). As the 6th largest carbon emitter in the world, with 70% of deforestation and other forest degradation (DFID, 2014), Indonesia has important effects on climate change. This thesis aims to uncover and analyse the complexities of Indonesian bilateral climate partnerships as they aimed to improve climate governance primarily between 2009 and 2016.
As part of this thesis, I have developed the âtransformative 4Is+3â analytical framework. This new analytical approach is used for assessing the complexities of bilateral climate partnerships in order to understand whether transformational change took place in Indonesia during this period. This research uses a qualitative approach, drawing on in-depth interviews from key informants inside and outside Indonesia, as well as documentary sources, in order to build a comparative study of three major bilateral climate donors (Norway, the UK, and Australia).
The central finding of this thesis is that there was only limited evidence that the three major bilateral climate partnerships with Indonesia between 2009 and 2016 had some impact on climate policy transformation. These changes took the form of some minimal substantive changes across the 4I+3 transitions. Among the seven indicators identified in the transformative 4i+3s framework, the factors of institutionalism and leadership change had the most impact across the complexities of bilateral climate partnerships. Overall, however, the bilateral approach to the Indonesian climate change context did not lead to significant climate governance improvements
From Analogue to Digital: Reconsidering Copyright And The Exclusive Rights of Authors In An Era Of Technological Change
After the First Industrial Revolution, a series of technologies challenged copyright law and pushed the law to accommodate, expand, and develop. Compared with analogue technologies, digital technologies present an even greater challenge to copyright law, which is under pressure to adapt to the rapid changes in the technologies. When digital technology was in its infancy, analogue copyright law was extended to the digital realm and became known as digital copyright law. âDigital copyright lawâ, however, is no more than a tailoring, tinkering and twisting of analogue copyright law, which fits poorly into the new digital environment. In colloquial terms, it is fitting the square digital copyright law into a round digital hole.
The digital world is an entirely new environment and digital technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate. There is a need for a new approach to digital copyright law that could accommodate digital technologies for disseminating copyright works in a more realistic manner than the current approach of simply adapting old analogue concepts. Current digital copyright lawâa phrase that broadly refers to any provision or regulation dealing with copyright issues in the digital environmentâis not consistent with technological developments. Digital technologies continually expand access to digital copyright works, whereas current digital copyright law significantly restricts such access. The approach suggested in this thesis allows content users to freely access digital copyright works while ensuring copyright holdersâ adequate remuneration from the works. It is inspired by an existing business model under which users can freely replicate and disseminate (or access) digital copyright works but cannot freely use the works. To accommodate this model, the thesis suggests that current digital copyright law needs to be overhauled
Acesso ao meio em redes LoRa com mĂșltiplas gateways de baixo custo
With the emergence of Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies,
as support to Internet of Things (IoT) applications, Long-Range
(LoRa) popularity emerged, being actually one of the most up-and-coming
LPWAN technologies, despite the low-rate transmissions and duty-cycle restrictions.
Such recognition is due to LoRa's suitable characteristics for
large-scale IoT networks, which span from long-range communications,
guaranteed by its proprietary modulation scheme, to low power consumption,
a fundamental feature for IoT sensor networks.
The focus of this dissertation is the study of medium access control strategies
in large-scale single-channel LoRa networks with multiple gateways with
respect to the amount of delivered useful information and network access
fairness.
Firstly, it is proposed and analysed a medium access control strategy for
LoRa networks with multiple single-channel gateways and the same transmission
parameters are used by the entire network. It is based on the pure-
ALOHA protocol used in LoRa, and each end-device uses control packets
to advertise its transmissions.
In the following, a new access strategy based on channel hopping is proposed.
In this, each ED uses the transmission characteristics that are most
convenient to it, with respect to the signal's quality with the single-channel
GWs that are in its communication range.
These strategies aimed to increase the efficiency of the network, allowing
end-devices to transmit faster and increasing the percentage of successfully
transmitted packets by reducing the amount of collisions, given the
regulation of the competition in the access to the transmission medium.Com o aparecimento das tecnologias Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN),
como suporte para as aplicaçÔes da Internet of Things (IoT), Long-
Range (LoRa) tornou-se popular, sendo atualmente uma das tecnologias
LPWAN mais promissoras, ainda que as suas transmissÔes tenham baixas
taxas de débito e restriçÔes nos ciclos de trabalho. A popularidade deve-se
Ă s caracterĂsticas que a tecnologia LoRa possui adequadas para redes IoT de
larga escala, que vão desde transmissÔes de longo alcance, garantidas pelo
esquema de modulação que esta utiliza, até ao baixo consumo de energia,
aspeto crucial em redes de sensores da IoT.
O foco desta dissertação é o estudo de estratégias de controlo de acesso
ao meio para redes LoRa de grande escala com canal Ășnico e mĂșltiplas
gateways, relativamente Ă quantidade de informação Ăștil entregue e Ă justiça
no acesso ao meio.
Inicialmente, Ă© proposto e analisado um esquema de controlo de acesso ao
meio para redes LoRa com mĂșltiplas gateways e com um Ășnico canal, onde
os mesmos parĂąmetros de transmissĂŁo sĂŁo utilizados por toda a rede. Este
Ă© baseado no protocolo ALOHA puro utilizado no LoRa, e cada nĂł terminal
utiliza pacotes de controlo para anunciar as suas transmissÔes.
No seguimento, é proposto uma nova estratégia de acesso ao meio baseado
na alteração do canal de transmissão. Neste, cada nó terminal usa as
caracterĂsticas de transmissĂŁo que lhe forem mais favorĂĄveis, relativamente
Ă qualidade de sinal que tem com as gateways que se encontram no seu
alcance de comunicação.
Estas estratĂ©gias visaram aumentar a eficiĂȘncia da rede, permitindo que os
nĂłs terminais transmitam mais rapidamente, e aumentando a percentagem
de pacotes transmitidos com sucesso através da redução da quantidade de
colisÔes, possibilitada pela regulação da competição no acesso ao canal de
transmissão.Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e TelecomunicaçÔe
A Post-Colonial Era? Bridging Ml'kmaq and Irish Experiences of Colonialism
This dissertation explores the links between the past and present impacts of colonization in Ireland and colonization in Mikmaki (the unceded territories of the Mi'kmaq Confederacy known to Canadians as the Maritimes provinces). It asks how might deepening our understandings of these potential links inform accountable and decolonial relationships between the Irish and the Mikmaq? In doing so, it argues that comparatively examining Irish and Mikmaq experiences of colonialism can offer concrete insights not only into the way that the Irish and the Mikmaq have an interwoven past, but also the way that the legacies of colonialism are permeating everyday life in the present in both regions. Refusing colonial representations of Mi'kma'ki and recentering Mi'kmaq worldviews throughout this comparison, this dissertation presents Mi'kma'ki as a discrete and sovereign (occupied) territory. The dissertation begins by providing an overview of the geographical and sociopolitical context of Ireland and Mi'kma'ki while introducing some of the links that have caused community members in both nations to call for this type of comparative research to be completed. The second chapter explores key historical moments in Irish and Mi'kmaq history which serve not just as a foundation for understanding the historical context of current experiences of colonialism in both regions, but also highlights the way that Ireland and Mi'kma'ki have had their pasts interwoven by British colonialism and the Irish diaspora. Drawing on oral life histories gathered in the bordertowns between County Donegal and Derry/Londonderry in Ireland, as well as Eskasoni First Nation in Unama'ki (Cape Breton) in Mi'kma'ki, the third and fourth chapters respectively explore the way that Irish and Mi'kmaq community members are currently experiencing the impacts of the legacies of British colonialism in everyday life. Finally, the dissertation concludes by reiterating the main insights shared by community members around the current state of colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization in both regions, before briefly discussing the postdoctoral research (and other areas of inquiry) that are expanding the inquiry of this project further while highlighting how the Irish and Lnuk might use the insights from the project to increase their collaborations and support one another
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