Mining culture, elevating taste: foodies and the work of refinement

As a means of social differentiation through taste, distinction has historically been viewed as a form of snobbishness. Elites with high cultural capital used their exclusive, esoteric, and refined preferences to both signal and justify their superior position in society. More recently, however, scholars have largely agreed that the dynamics of distinction have changed. In our “omnivorous” era, the types of tastes that are socially valuable are also more wide ranging, accessible, and tolerant of cultural expressions outside the Western elite cannon. While broadly accepted, the omnivore thesis has been subject to sustained critiques. This dissertation furthers such inquiries by examining whether the metaphor of the omnivore is appropriate.To be omnivorous, two separate criteria must be met: taste must be less restrictive than classic sociological theories would predict, and new cultural objects must be valued on their own terms. Across four food-related cases, I ask which logics and practices go into elevating seemingly ordinary and non-elite material objects: in 1) the category of “natural” foods in differently classed supermarket settings; 2) the service strategies of food truck operators trying to appeal to customers in different Boston neighborhoods; 3) the standards of value applied by participants in a food swap event, where individuals barter with items they have made, grown, or foraged themselves; and 4) the reappraisal of rosé wine by wine critics. Comparisons across diverse cases avoid reifying what counts as valuable within a given category, bringing more general logics of the gastronomic field to the fore. Using ethnography and content analysis, I find that while contemporary foodies may be consuming a wider range of objects, these objects are not accepted on their own terms. New objects and food practices are more highly valued when producers, distributors, consumers, and critics can monopolize the social meanings that get attached to them. As a result, this dissertation suggests a new metaphor for taste in contemporary social life. Foodies are more like the miners of our culinary landscapes than true omnivores. Theirs is an eye for raw materials—appropriating and refining their quarries to fit their needs

TextFrame: Cosmopolitanism and Non-Exclusively Anglophone Poetries

This project proposes a replacement for some institutional-archival mechanisms of non-exclusively anglophone poetry as it is produced under racial capitalism and archived via its universities and grant-bearing nonprofits. The project argues specifically for the self-archiving of non-exclusively anglophone poetry, and by extension of poetry, in a manner that builds away from US-dominated, nationally-organized institutions. It argues that cosmopolitanist norm translation, as advocated by various critics, can function as part of a critique of institutional value creation used in maintaining inequalities through poetry. The US-based Poetry Foundation is currently the major online archive of contemporary anglophone poetry; the project comprises a series of related essays that culminate in a rough outline for a collaboratively designed, coded, and maintained application to replace the Foundation’s website. Whatever benefit might result, replacing archival mechanisms of racial capitalism while remaining within its systemic modes of value creation is at best a form of substitution: it is not an actual change in relations and not a transition to anything. Doing so may, however, allow greater clarity in understanding how poetry is situated within US-based institutions, beyond the images and values that poets and critics in the US often help to maintain. Chapter one, “‘Indianness’ and Omission: 60 Indian Poets,” reads the anthology 60 Indian Poets, published in 2008 in India and the UK (with US distribution), as argument about the contours of Indian Poetry in English and about the contours of India’s relations in the world. It relates Rashmi Sadana’s work on the meanings of English in India to decisions made within the anthology, and look further at Pollock’s conception of cosmopolitanism and vernacularity, particular as it applies to the Indian North-East and the poetry of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. The second chapter, “Archival Power: Individualization, the Racial State, and Institutional Poetry” engages Roderick Ferguson’s concept of archival power to explain the 2015 “crisis” within contemporary US poetry driven by practitioners of conceptual poetry, and an attempted archival act with regard to the Black Lives Matter movement. The chapter ends with a fragment of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s recent account of US university life as experienced by Black artists and scholars. That chapter is followed by “The Poetry Foundation as Site of Archival Power,” which extends Jodi Melamed’s critique of US university value-creation mechanisms to Poetry magazine and the Poetry Foundation’s website. It argues that the Poetry Foundation functions as a de facto arm of the US university system as outlined in the previous chapter, and aids in capitalist value-creation. “TextFrame: An Open Archive for Poetry,” the fourth chapter, is an attempt to begin thinking a replacement for current mechanisms of archiving non-exclusively anglophone poetry. The fifth chapter, “Narayanan’s Language Events as Free-Tier Application,” documents work imagined for TextFrame, as an application, that has actually already been built: the poet and scholar Vivek Narayanan adapted Robert Desnos’s Language Events for the classroom using a variety of discrete free services, and the present author collaborated with Narayanan in creating a stand-alone Web application. Chapters six, seven, and eight function as case studies to be used in creating templates for providing context to specific poems within any built application. Both of the specific moments covered transmogrify the “anti-psychological.” The sixth chapter, “An Unendurable Age: Ashbery, O’Hara, and 1950s Precursors of ‘Self’ Psychology” thus argues that an anti-psychological ethos is developed in Ashbery and O’Hara’s poems of that moment. It shows that Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto” (1959) is almost certainly a parody of Gordon Allport’s theory of Personalism, of related strands of 1950s American psychology, and of the poetry that developed alongside them in the 1930s. It follows other critics in looking at midcentury conceptions of schizophrenia as a specifically homosexual disease, and argues for the importance of contemporarily published examples of schizophrenic discourse, particularly those of Harry Stack Sullivan. It argues that Ashbery’s poem “A Boy” can be read as directly engaging those ideas, and opposing them. The shorter discussions follow consider the affinities that Some Trees has with anti- or a-psychological theories of mind that were being developed at Harvard and MIT at the time that Ashbery and O’Hara were in Cambridge, including generative grammar and critiques of philosophical analyticity. The eighth chapter, “Before Conceptualism: Disgust and Over-determination in White-dominated Experimental Poetry in New York, 1999-2003,” highlights Dan Farrell and Lytle Shaw’s very different uses of lyric’s peculiar staging of voice to foreground the multi-furcation of white identities and voice in response to state pressures. The last two chapters take up two corollaries, or theoretical concerns that fell out trying to think a cosmopolitanist application. The first, “Why Not Reddit?” examines existing commercial cosmopolitanist solutions for some of the functionality proposed for the application, and reasons for rejecting them. In doing so, it discusses Thomas Farrell’s construct of “rhetorical culture” in detail, and traces a theory of communication and authorship within a community, particularly with regard to thinking history. The last chapter (and second corollary) is titled “Ethos in Pedagogy as a Limit on Norm Translation.” It establishes the Aristotelian concept of ethos as a pedagogical limit for norm translation. The study’s governing interest is not the conflicts or differences between practitioners or tendencies that are detailed here, but their relative incomprehensibility of those differences outside of their formative contexts

Mediatization, Marketization and Non-profits: A Comparative Case Study of Community Foundations in the UK and Germany

PhD ThesisOver the past decades, media actors and technologies have profoundly transformed how organisations and institutions communicate with citizens and vice versa. Drawing on mediatization theory, the thesis explores the contours and context of communication by non-profit organisations, focusing on community foundations in the UK and Germany. The aim of the work is to provide a deeper understanding of the strategies, motivations and patterns of communication which have been adopted in these organisations which now exist within a highly networked and mediatised society, and the ways in which those strategies have kept pace with technological change. I make an original contribution to the concept of mediatization by applying it to the non-profit sector, using a comparative case study approach. I also make an original contribution to our understanding of how non-profits plan their communication strategies in a contemporary environment of information overload and economic austerity. Drawing on interviews with communication professionals and marketing managers in a range of community foundations in the UK and Germany, the study explores how activities such as building relationships, strategic planning and positioning, fundraising, attracting volunteers and interacting with stakeholders, including potential donors, are influenced by processes of mediatization and marketization. In addition to the interviews, a content analysis of these organisations’ websites has been undertaken to better understand their adoption and use of digital communication tools to maximise their effectiveness online. Through a careful and in-depth analysis of how processes of mediatization, marketization and professionalisation affect these non-profits, the study provides a timely assessment of both drivers and resistors in adopting and adapting to social and technological change within this particular sector

Information Seeking from Web-Based Resources: Sensemaking Strategies and Implications for Interaction Design

The internet has made an enormous volume of information available, and there has been substantial research into how users look for information. However, there has been much less research about how they make sense of what they find, and how sensemaking is shaped by the tasks they are trying to achieve. This research addresses that gap, with empirical studies of sensemaking during web-based information tasks. Two main studies are presented, which aimed to expose the relationship between information seeking and information comprehension and use. The first study explored the actions of experienced information processors (in this case, doctoral students) as they undertook research-related web-based tasks related to their own work. The second study observed experienced users as they undertook an unfamiliar topic comprehension task. In both studies participants were encouraged to ‘think-aloud’ as they completed web-based tasks. Audio-recording was used in Study-1 with video-recording in Study-2. In addition to the task session, background questionnaires and sample interviews were applied. A detailed, iterative inductive analysis was undertaken for each study. The analysis produced a framework that models the users’ process in terms of five categories of information interactions: seeking, evaluating for selection, evaluating for use, compilation, and planning. A range of visual representations were developed to capture the user sessions, expressing facets such as how resources were used over time and in combination, and the sequences of user behaviours. Attention was given to the use of representation throughout this process. Sensemaking goals and strategies were inferred from users’ behaviours and utterances, and were related to their activity and output. The intertwined nature of information seeking and sensemaking activity was revealed, and planning (not addressed in previous literature) was identified as a significant behaviour that drives strategy and binds the other behaviours to the task-in-hand. These findings have implications for interaction design and for tools to support sensemaking

Examining the Organizational Capacity of Public Libraries That Offer Obesity Prevention Programs

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) is a federally funded grant program that helps SNAP-eligible populations make healthy choices, like those outlined by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. Together with implementation agencies (IAs) and local sites, SNAP-Ed provides direct nutrition education and facilitates policy, systems, and environmental strategies (PSEs) such as farmers markets and community gardens. This qualitative research investigated two specific aims: 1.) Understand the elements of organization capacity that influence a public library’s ability to implement obesity prevention programs and 2.) Evaluate the need for library staff public health knowledge when implementing obesity prevention programs at public libraries. This study included twenty-one in-depth interviews with librarians or library staff that offer nutrition-related obesity prevention programming at their public library branch or library system. The researcher implemented the constant comparison method to determine emerging themes and phenomena. Themes were coded in all transcripts, narratives that describe the theme content developed, and exemplary vignettes selected. Aim 1 the researcher found that librarians and library staff were motivated to offer obesity prevention programs, but there are several organizational capacity challenges that must be addressed to provide these types of programs for users. Librarians and library staff cited limited funding and reliance on volunteers as program partners as frequent barriers. However, they believed these barriers could be overcome with their organizational capacity strength - internal support for the program. The researcher also found that many obesity prevention programs at public libraries are organized so that community partners answer most health and nutrition program participant questions. However, librarians and library staff receive health and nutrition questions from users in general. Librarians felt more confident directing users to printed health resources compared to non-printed health resources. Several librarians believed that more educational opportunities about helping users with their health and nutrition questions could help future librarians, especially those that serve low-income areas. This research can help SNAP-Ed and implementing agencies as they continue to work with public libraries. SNAP-Ed implementers can recognize partnerships as a likely limiting organizational capacity at public libraries and work to develop that capacity when implementing SNAP-ed strategies

Journalism: New Challenges

In seeking to identify and critique a range of the most pressing challenges confronting journalism today, this book examines topics such as: the role of the journalist in a democratic society, including where questions of truth and free speech are concerned; the changing priorities of newspaper, radio, television, magazine, photography, and online news organisations; the political, economic and technological pressures on news and editorial independence; the impact of digital convergence on the forms and practices of newsgathering and storytelling; the dynamics of professionalism, such as the negotiation of impartiality and objectivity in news reports; journalists’ relationships with their sources, not least where the ‘spin’ of public relations shapes what’s covered, how and why; evolving genres of news reporting, including politics, business, sports, celebrity, documentary, war and peace journalism; journalism’s influence on its audiences, from moral panics to the trauma of representing violence and tragedy; the globalisation of news, including the role of international news agencies; new approaches to investigative reporting in a digital era; and the rise of citizen journalism, live-blogging and social media, amongst many others. The chapters are written in a crisp, accessible style, with a sharp eye to the key ideas, concepts, issues and debates warranting critical attention. Each ends with a set of ‘Challenging Questions’ to explore as you develop your own perspective, as well as a list of ‘Recommended Reading’ to help push the conversation onwards. May you discover much here that stimulates your thinking and, with luck, prompts you to participate in lively debate about the future of journalism

Political advertising as a resource for citizenship. The reception of audiovisual rhetoric

This thesis explores the reception of audiovisual rhetoric in the form of political advertising. I argue that political ads can function as a resource for citizens. The ads allow people to enact a receptive rhetorical citizenship. They do so by providing substance for everyday practical judgement on issues and political leaders, and through sparking more general discussions on political matters. The thesis contributes empirically by examining receptive dimensions of rhetorical citizenship, which scholars have called for at numerous occasions but not yet fully explored. The thesis contributes theoretically through proposing a way researchers can go about this, including the formulation of four virtues of receptive rhetorical citizenship: inclusiveness, openness, connection and literacy. The thesis combines the traditions of rhetoric and audience studies in a manner that has only rarely been put into play before. The empirical data material revolves around political ads produced for two separate elections in 2013 and 2015. Directing the main thrust of analysis towards reception, the data material consists of 16 focus groups conducted with a range of voters. Taking a holistic approach to the study of audiences, the study also draws on supplementary interviews with 23 ad producers, strategists and politicians, as well as a rhetorical textual analysis of the eight films that were discussed in the groups. Thematically, the eight films produced talk and discussion around three key themes: 1) the balance between informative aspects and entertaining aspects in political ads; 2) negativity in political ads; and 3) personalization in political ads. Lastly, 4), I examine informants’ discussions from the vantage point of reception research in order to further tease out nuances of how citizens use ideals such as authenticity and aptum as evaluative concepts, as well as discuss informant reflexivity and various modes of reception they engaged in. I find that citizens are deeply ambivalent to political ads as a genre, in particular towards the trade-off between informing and entertaining in a communicative text. I find that informants for the most part accepted negativity in political ads, while at the same time attempted to discern between useful and non-useful negativity. Furthermore, I provide nuance and detail to how people use personality as a route to judgement on candidates and other political matters when watching advertisements. Importantly, elements of personalization - ordinariness, authenticity and sociability - are highly at work. Lastly, I provide further detail on what kind of receptive rhetorical citizenship people enact in the interview situation. I propose the concept of breaching moments through authenticity and aptum as a novel way to understand the nuts and bolts of how form and content interacts when people are to evaluate their political leaders on screen