28 research outputs found
Dildoshops, Gritty, and Bernieâs Mittens: The Framing of American Politics Through Pop Cultural Memes
An unprecedented number of memes emerged in response to the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. This article offers a thematic analysis of a corpus of memes published on Twitter between November 3, 2020 and January 20 2021 in relation to the U.S. presidential election. By further employing a qualitative discourse analysis and close readings of selected examples, this article explores the stances and intertextual references expressed in the memetic discourse. I illustrate which events users engage with, how they frame them using the elements of American pop culture, and the different functions such memes served for different publics. Central events â such as Donald Trumpâs press conference in a Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot, Joe Bidenâs victory and rumors about the Russian president Putin resigning â were commented upon both with broad references to widely popular franchises such as Star Wars and with multi-layered intertextual references to iconography of meme culture such as the Hockey mascot Gritty. Memes exaggerated events for comedic purposes, providing relief after a long time of tension, as well as possibly trivializing and distorting public perception of events. While meme activity peaked on November 6th and 7th, a singular viral meme of Bernie Sanders emerged after Joe Bidenâs inauguration, illustrating a different genre of meme as a response to a different political situation in which the political figure serves a wide variety of purposes in commenting upon popular culture. Such memes served to establish a sense of community, agency, and catharsis after the anxieties many Democratic voters experienced prior to the election. These findings present the growing role of popular and fan culture to political discourse on mainstream social media platforms and their varied and highly flexible expression
Social Protest Folklore and Student Critical Consciousness
Bridgewater State University undergraduate Introduction to Folklore students, overwhelmingly young and white, with little to no experience with folklore, found a voice to honor and highlight liberatory and social justice-oriented protest folklore in and around the world and in their own experiences. Students in the fall 2020 Introduction to Folklore classes were confronted in life-altering ways with a global pandemic that endangered them and their loved ones and shone a light on hideous health inequities. The relentless killings of black people stripped away any illusions that systemic racism and white supremacy were not daily, ever-present forces. At the same time, Bridgewater State University was making purposeful and intentional efforts to being a social justice university. These factors seem to have led to a transformation of consciousness on the part of many white students, as they moved toward a critical consciousness that is so necessary for ensuring a responsible and accountable citizenry.
Social protest folklore is a vehicle for focusing justified political anger and outrage toward the sources of oppression. Protest folklore has existed, and is ongoing, among people of all historic times and geographical spaces in order to reveal a societyâs injustices, brutality, and oppressions, while expressing the struggle for justice, compassion, dignity, and human rights.
The social protest texts contributed by Introduction to Folklore students as part of a course assignment represent accusations against a toxic culture and its multiple oppressions. The folklore texts stand for the demystification of all that has been normalized, including gender-based violence, racial oppression, social injustice, denial of human rights. The folklore texts students explored represent a variety of folklore genres including visual art and craft, performance art, spoken word, poetry, song, music, chants, slogans, gestures, and signs. The process of investigating and sharing social protest folklore allowed students a chance to reach for authentic engagement with social suffering, voices of protest, and their own developing critical consciousness
Chaos and context : speculations about the prominence of participatory art since the mid 1990s
Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-58).In his essay The Poetics of the Open Work, Umberto Eco suggests that 'open work' of the 1960s, which stressed audience involvement, contingency and an anti-institutional stance, is an expression of a Quantum paradigm. Here, the irrationality and lack of order of Quantum Theory is seen as paralleled in artistic expression. Since the mid 1990s, participatory art has gained prominence, both in terms of current art production and retrospectives of Dadaist and 1960s 'open work'. Using Eco's essay as a model, this could be seen as a result of the progression of a Quantum Theory worldview to a view that is understood in terms of Chaos Theory. The patterns that mathematical models such as natural numbers, Calculus, Statistical Mathematics and Quantum Theory propose have parallels in social and artistic expression. In an extension of this, Chaos Theory is the latest mathematical model that social and artistic trends express. This is suggested by the mirroring of Chaos patterns in current social phenomena such as the Internet and experience economy. The similarity in approach between social phenomena and participatory art suggests that they answer the same social/audience demands. My primary contention is that the environment in which audiences and artists currently operate is such that demands and expectations raised by Chaos Theory are answered by participatory art, just as they are answered by wider social trends. The primary Chaos patterns that can be observed are interconnection, phase change and feedback. This is not a matter of a linear influence of cause and effect. It is not that Chaos inspires certain characteristics which are then expressed in various social phenomena. Rather, encountering Chaos characteristics in daily life raises expectations that these characteristics will be encountered elsewhere. We are thus not speaking of a causative relation between Chaos theory and social phenomena. Rather, there is a complex pattern of escalation which encourages interaction, feedback and phase change in a dynamic, chiasmic system which itself can best be analysed as another Chaos phenomenon
Researching nannagogy: a case study celebrating women in their prime crafting eco-activism
Larraine Larri investigated the educative mechanisms for transformative action addressing political stasis on climate change within the Australian Knitting Nannas environmental activist movement. Using a transdisciplinary approach, the study addressed a lacuna in older women's environmental activist learning by identifying dynamics of situated, experiential, and social transformative learning
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Through the Eye of a Needle: Craftivism as an Emerging Mode of Civic Engagement and Cultural Participation
There has been a grassroots revival of craftivism leading up to, and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This qualitative dissertation explores the experiences of women within three craftivist groups to facilitate a deeper understanding of their conceptions of craft, activism and feminism, the salience of older women within these communities, and how the affordances of new media are potentially reshaping craftivism. Drawing on interview data, as well as offline and online participant observation, this study found that craftivists have highly diverse personal trajectories and understandings of feminism and activism, that older womenâmany with a lifelong history of activismâplay a significant role in craftivist groups, and that participation in craftivism, supported through extensive use of social media and online communication, provides a gateway to civic expression and engagement. Beyond deepening our understanding of craftivism in the current political climate, this research makes significant contributions to scholarship on participatory culture, activism, and civic engagement. While these bodies of research have traditionally been youth-centric, this dissertation adds value by shedding light on the participatory practices of older women in creative online sites
Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy
âWho am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?â These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond.Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other. Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a âconstant companionâ in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability. Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently
Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy: Care and community in Milan and beyond
âWho am I at this (st)age? Where am I and where should I be, and how and where should I live?â These questions, which individuals ask themselves throughout their lives, are among the central themes of this book, which presents an anthropological account of the everyday experiences of age and ageing in an inner-city neighbourhood in Milan, and in places and spaces beyond. Ageing with Smartphones in Urban Italy explores ageing and digital technologies amidst a backdrop of rapid global technological innovation, including mHealth (mobile health) and smart cities, and a number of wider socio-economic and technological transformations that have brought about significant changes in how people live, work and retire, and how they communicate and care for each other.
Based on 16 months of urban digital ethnographic research in Milan, the smartphone is shown to be a âconstant companionâ in, of and for contemporary life. It accompanies people throughout the day and night, and through individual and collective experiences of movement, change and rupture. Smartphone practices tap into and reflect the moral anxieties of the present moment, while posing questions related to life values and purpose, identities and belonging, privacy and sociability.
Through her extensive investigation, Shireen Walton argues that ageing with smartphones in this contemporary urban Italian context is about living with ambiguity, change and contradiction, as well as developing curiosities about a changing world, our changing selves, and changing relationships with and to others. Ageing with smartphones is about figuring out how best to live together, differently
Fashion-able. Hacktivism and engaged fashion design
This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer
role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse
engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social
activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an
engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice,
where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces
and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants
to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective
experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able.
As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the
DIY upcycling of clothes through âopen sourceâ fashion âcookbooksâ. By means of
hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding
of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research
projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion
experiments in galleries, collaborative âhackingâ at a shoe factory, engaged design at a
rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands.
Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs,
the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal
interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative
reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces
available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as
hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words,
bending the current while still keeping the power on
Materiality, Craft, Identity, and Embodiment: Reworking Digital Writing Pedagogy
Too often in Rhetoric and Composition, multimodal writing (an expansive practice of opening up the media and modes with which writers might work) is reduced to digital writing. âReworking Digital Writingâ argues that the opportunities and insights of digital writing should encourage us to turn our attention to all kinds of nondigital materials that have not traditionally been considered part of composingâincluding the materials that are already familiar to crafters and do-it-yourselfers (DIYers). Further, I argue that the material, technical, rhetorical, economic, and social dimensions of DIY craft provide a coherent framework for teaching multimodal writing in ways that encourage students to engage in the work of writing in ways that can make more apparent the composing activities and processes of writing and make more concrete the kinds of work that composed objects can do. Through this approach to composing, I argue that we can help students experience the very real ways in which writing can reshape our subjectivities and build new kinds of worlds with others. To that end, I examine DIY craft histories, theories, and practices to develop a new pedagogical framework for teaching multimodal writing