7,650 research outputs found

    A participatory approach for digital documentation of Egyptian Bedouins intangible cultural heritage

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    The Bedouins of Egypt hold a unique intangible cultural heritage (ICH), with distinct cultural values and social practices that are rapidly changing as a consequence of having settled after having been nomadic for centuries. We present our attempt to develop a bottom-up approach to document Bedouin ICH. Grounded in participatory design practices, the project purpose was two-fold: engaging Egyptian Engineering undergraduates with culturally-distant technology users and introducing digital self-documentation of ICH to the Bedouin community. We report the design of a didactic model that deployed the students as research partners to co-design four prototypes of ICH documentation mobile applications with the community. The prototypes reflected an advanced understanding for the values to the Bedouins brought by digital documentation practices. Drawing from our experience, three recommendations were elicited for similar ICH projects. Namely, focusing on the community benefits; promoting motivation ownership, and authenticity; and pursuing a shared identity between designers and community members. These guidelines hold a strong value as they have been tested against local challenges that could have been detrimental to the project

    Imagining interventions for collective sex environments

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    Frank’s (2018) article provides an excellent summary of transdisciplinary research concerned with collective sex environments, synthesizing highly diverse studies spanning five decades. The contributing papers utilize a broad range of methods and reflect many key sexual health risks across several diverse and distinct populations. For many readers, such as ourselves, with a particular interest in a single population, Frank’s synthesis provides a much needed and entirely fascinating wider perspective. This overarching vantage point can teach us about similarities and differences across populations, while simultaneously illuminating the populations and research we know so well through a different lens. As such, the paper provides an essential contribution to the literature. However, rather than champion the paper’s many strengths, within this Commentary we wish to grapple with what could be seen as its potential shortcomings. Our aim here is not be critical for the sake of it, but to somewhat playfully push debates further about many issues addressed within the paper. In this way, we wish to initiate more dialogue concerning collective sex, concomitant risks, and imaginative ways to ameliorate such risks

    Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene fiction

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    This article explores metaphorical language in the strand of contemporary fiction that Trexler discusses under the heading of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ – namely, novels that probe the convergence of human experience and geological or climatological processes in times of climate change. Why focus on metaphor? Because, as cognitive linguists working in the wake of Lakoff and Johnson have shown, metaphor plays a key role in closing the gap between everyday, embodied experience and more intangible or abstract realities – including, we suggest, the more-than-human temporal and spatial scales that come to the fore with the Anthropocene. In literary narrative, metaphorical language is typically organized in coherent clusters that amplify the effects of individual metaphors. Based on this assumption, we discuss the results of a systematic coding of metaphorical language in three Anthropocene novels by Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan. We show that the emergent metaphorical patterns enrich and complicate the novels’ staging of the Anthropocene, and that they can destabilize the strict separation between human experience and nonhuman realities

    Hero or anti-hero?: Narratives of newswork and journalistic identity construction in complex digital megastories

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    Exploring constructions of journalistic identity in a digital age has been a lively area of scholarship as the field of digital journalism studies has grown (Franklin 2013, 2014; Steensen and Ahva 2015). Yet despite many approaches to understanding digital change, key avenues for understanding changing constructions of identity remain underexplored. This paper addresses a conceptual void in research literature by employing semiotic and semantic approaches to analyse performances of journalistic identity in narratives of newswork facilitated by and focused on digital megaleaks. It seeks to aid understanding of the way narratives describe changing practices of newsgathering, and how journalists position themselves within these hybrid traditional/digital stories. Findings show news narratives reinforce the primacy of journalists within traditional boundaries of a journalistic field, and articulate a preferred imagination of journalistic identity. Methodologically, this paper shows how semantic and semiotic approaches lend themselves to studying narratives of newswork within journalistic metadiscourses to understand journalistic identity at the nexus of traditional and digital dynamics. The resultant portrait of journalistic identity channels a sociohistoric, romantic notion of the journalist as “the shadowy figure always to be found on the edges of the century’s great events” (Inglis 2002, xi), updated to accommodate modern, digital dynamics

    From Topophobia to Topophilia: The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space

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    The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space liefert einen umfassenden und kritischen Überblick ĂŒber die jĂŒngsten Entwicklungen im Feld der „spatial literary studies“. Seine grundlegenden Fragen bewegen sich entlang der Pfade, die der spatial turn innerhalb der Kulturwissenschaften eröffnet hat – fĂŒr die Geisteswissenschaften im Allgemeinen und fĂŒr die Literaturwissenschaft im Besonderen. Die enthaltenen Untersuchungen beleuchten zentrale Probleme im Blick auf das reziproke VerhĂ€ltnis von RĂ€umlichkeit und menschlicher Wahrnehmung, Fragen der Produktion von rĂ€umlichen und sozialen Beziehungen sowie eine Interpretation von Raum als fluider Dimension im Status eines konstanten Werdens. Die BeitrĂ€ge bieten grĂŒndliche Analysen eines großen Spektrums literarischer Texte von diversem historischem und geographischem Ursprung. An vielen Stellen wird dabei der Beweis erbracht, wie tiefgreifend sich jĂŒngste Entwicklungen in PhĂ€nomenologie und new materialism auf die Literaturwissenschaft ausgewirkt haben. Weitreichend in Umfang und Inhalt, dabei prĂ€gnant und zugĂ€nglich, sollte dieser Band ihr Publikum finden – innerhalb der ganzen Bandbreite der betroffenen Disziplinen sowie unter Einsteigern und Experten gleichermaßen.The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space provides a comprehensive critical overview of the latest advancements in the arena of spatial literary studies. Its primary questions move along the avenues opened up for literary criticism by the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies and the humanities in general. The investigations illuminate key concerns regarding the reciprocal relationships between spatiality and the human senses, their production of spatial and social relations, as well as an interpretation of space as a fluid dimension constantly in a state of becoming. The contributions present thoroughgoing analyses of a wide array of literary texts from diverse historical and geographical settings, and frequently evidence the profound impact that recent phenomenological and New Materialist bents have exerted on literary study. Expansive in scope and content, yet incisive and approachable, the volume should find both novices and experts, from the full range of disciplines that it engages with, among its reading public

    Slut shaming, girl power and sexualisation : Thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls

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    This viewpoint begins by exploring whether the global phenomenon of the 2011 ‘SlutWalks’ constitutes a feminist politics of re-signification. We then look at some qualitative, focus group data with teen girls who participated in a UK SlutWalk. We suggest girls are not only negotiating a schizoid double pull towards performing knowing sexy ‘slut’ in postfeminist media contexts, but also managing de-sexualising protectionist discourses in school, particularly in relation to the highly regulatory moral panic over child ‘sexualistion’. We consider whether the SlutWalks are adult-centric and if teen girls’ involvement in a SlutWalk offered any critical rupturings to sexual regulation in their everyday lives

    Queerying Public Art in Digitally Networked Space

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    There is an increasing interest among geographers in studying social engagement with public artwork, but there remains a lack of scholarship on how such engagement operates in digitally networked space. This article examines this gap on the basis of a virtual ethnography involving (social) media analysis on encounters with Paul McCarthy’s temporary installation Tree in Place Vendîme, Paris, 2014. This artwork, a 24-metre inflatable resembling a giant butt plug, unleashed a heated debate over social media about the artwork’s (mis)uses of the locality and urban public sphere. From this case study, remembering/forgetting and materiality/digitality emerged as ambiguous values/appropriations of this public artwork. Accordingly, experiences navigated between, foremostly, obscene and/or misplaced (the artwork’s postmodern/‘sexual’ style vs. the site’s classical architecture and Paris’ alleged ‘romantic’ image), ludic, and radical (i.e. anti-normative message towards permanence and heteropatriarchy). Considering such ambiguous and sexuality-related ramifications, I engage with ‘queerying’ as method for examining online mediated public-art engagement. The study demonstrates how receptions and interactions digitally intertwined with the temporary material artwork (where the examined digital material was not an intentional part of the artwork as initiated by the artist). Specifically, the queerying analysis shows how dialectical online and offline public-art engagements with Tree negotiated (i.e. mediated) and augmented (i.e. enhanced) one another and offered alternative ways for conceptualising user agency and spatial connectivity. This study can be of use for critical geographers using online media as both sites and tools for examining the bottom-up digital co-production of public art

    A qualitative study of children, young people and 'sexting' : English

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    The purpose of this small scale qualitative research was to respond to and enhance our understandings of the complex nature of sexting and the role of mobile technologies within peer teen networks. It was designed as a pilot study – to investigate a phenomenon whose nature, scale and dimensions were unknown. Thus the research itself also was small in scale and exploratory in nature and also culturally and geographically specific. We conducted focus group interviews with 35 young people years 8 and 10 in two inner city London schools. At the focus groups we asked participants to friend us on Facebook, with a research Facebook profile. We then mapped some of their activities online and returned for 22 individual interviews with selected case study young people. We also interviewed key teachers and staff at the schools. The study found that threats from peers in digital social networks were more problematic for young people that ‘stranger danger’ from adults. Digital technologies facilitated new visual cultures of surveillance, in which young women were pressured to send revealing body photos or asked to perform sexual services by text and through social networking sites. In this way, sexting aggravated peer hierarchies and forms of sexual harassment in schools, meaning that sexting was often coercive and was sometimes a form of cyberbullying. Girls were most negatively affected by ‘sexting’ in cultural contexts of increasing ‘sexualisation’ shaped by sexual double standards and boys had difficulty in challenging constructions of sexually aggressive masculinity. The research allowed for exploration of when pleasurable sexual flirtation through digital communication moved into sexual coercion and harassment, which was illustrated through narrative examples. Considering the relationship between online and offline risks it found sexual double standards in attitudes to digital sexual communication were linked to incidents of real playground sexual harassment and violence. Finally, it found that children at primary school age were being impacted by the coercive aspects of ‘sexting’ at an earlier age, than prior research indicated

    Young people's experiences of image-based sexual harassment and abuse in England and Canada: Toward a feminist framing of technologically facilitated sexual violence

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    This article reports on a qualitative research study Sharing Networked Image Practices (SNIP) among young people. We explore our findings from 37 focus groups with 206 young people aged (11–19) in London and South East England and Toronto, Canada conducted in 2019 and 2020. Drawing on feminist legal and criminological scholarship (Powell & Henry, 2017; McGlynn et al., 2017; McGlynn and Johnson, 2020) we develop a framework to clearly identify how and when image sharing should be constituted as forms of: (1) Image-Based Sexual Harassment (IBSH) (i.e. unsolicited penis images (‘dick pics’) and unwanted solicitation for nudes), and (2) Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) (i.e. non-consensual image creation/sharing). We argue that categorizing non-consensual image sharing, showing and distributing as image-based sexual harassment and abuse rather than ‘sexting’ is an important conceptual shift to enable young people, schools, parents and all relevant stakeholders to recognize and address new forms of technology-facilitated sexual violence
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