Disinformation and Fact-Checking in Contemporary Society

Funded by the European Media and Information Fund and research project PID2022-142755OB-I00

(Un)filial daughters and digital feminisms in China: The stories of awakening, resisting, and finding comrades

This thesis sets out to understand Chinese feminist struggles in a so-called digital era by looking at the experiences and practices of an emerging generation of digital feminists that came into light in Chinese feminist movements. Conceptually and methodologically, this research took inspirations from an interdisciplinary body of literature including feminist theory, sociology, media and cultural studies, girlhood studies and gender studies. Inspired by online ethnography and feminist participatory methodologies, it combined an online tracking of feminist events on Weibo with semi-structured interviews and social media diary study with 21 Chinese girls and young women. This thesis explores the embedded and embodied experiences of these participants as they discover and learn about feminism, resist and challenge gender and sexual inequalities, and try to build connections with like-minded people within and beyond the digital sphere. By charting feminist responses and resistance to familial discourses and norms around girlhood and young femininity, I show the emergence of feminist subjectivities of (un)filial daughters that arises from but also comes to reconfigure gender and sexuality within a neoliberal and postsocialist context of patriarchal familism in China. I build upon the concepts of networked counterpublics and networked affects to explore how these (un)filial daughters are networked to carve out spaces for feminist discussion in social media. Employing an affective-discursive analysis, I also tune into how networked feminist resistance and alliances are formed not merely on the basis of how women and feminists talk about these issues but also how they feel

Practices of Speculation: Modeling, Embodiment, Figuration

This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice

“Awe No Please Love Us”: Exploring L2 Teachers and Learners’ Perceptions of Online Intercultural (Im)politeness

Based on Kecskés’s (2014) intercultural pragmatics model, this study focuses on L2 teacher and learner perceptions of how conventionalized impoliteness formulae and implicational impoliteness (Culpeper, 2011) are shaped, negotiated, and produced interculturally on a social networking site (SNS), Instagram. In addition, the research sought to understand participants’ perceptions of the potential teachability of (im)politeness using extracts from Instagram. Teachability here related to both the pedagogical potential of these materials and their appropriateness for a formal instructional setting. The findings of the study suggest that participants view impoliteness language as characteristic of online platforms and that the featured topic also played a strong role in whether an instance was viewed as impolite; however, a metapragmatic intervention included in the interviews suggests that participants can become more aware of the different ways in which (im)politeness can be produced or perceived by users of a lingua franca, when prompted to reflect on linguistic choices. As for the potential teachability of impoliteness in a formal educational setting, participants were divided. The reasons that they give for supporting or rejecting the idea of social media texts as a means of teaching impoliteness point to some of the possible challenges teacher educators and program developers might face in integrating intercultural politeness

Practices of Speculation

This volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice

Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester