8,337 research outputs found

    Comedians without a Cause: The Politics and Aesthetics of Humour in Dutch Cabaret (1966-2020)

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    Comedians play an important role in society and public debate. While comedians have been considered important cultural critics for quite some time, comedy has acquired a new social and political significance in recent years, with humour taking centre stage in political and social debates around issues of identity, social justice, and freedom of speech. To understand the shifting meanings and political implications of humour within a Dutch context, this PhD thesis examines the political and aesthetic workings of humour in the highly popular Dutch cabaret genre, focusing on cabaret performances from the 1960s to the present. The central questions of the thesis are: how do comedians use humour to deliver social critique, and how does their humour resonate with political ideologies? These questions are answered by adopting a cultural studies approach to humour, which is used to analyse Dutch cabaret performances, and by studying related materials such as reviews and media interviews with comedians. This thesis shows that, from the 1960s onwards, Dutch comedians have been considered ‘progressive rebels’ – politically engaged, subversive, and carrying a left-wing political agenda – but that this image is in need of correction. While we tend to look for progressive political messages in the work of comedians who present themselves as being anti-establishment rebels – such as Youp van ‘t Hek, Hans Teeuwen, and Theo Maassen – this thesis demonstrates that their transgressive and provocative humour tends to protect social hierarchies and relationships of power. Moreover, it shows that, paradoxically, both the deliberately moderate and nuanced humour of Wim Kan and Claudia de Breij, and the seemingly past-oriented nostalgia of Alex Klaasen, are more radical and progressive than the transgressive humour of van ‘t Hek, Teeuwen and Maassen. Finally, comedians who present absurdist or deconstructionist forms of humour, such as the early student cabarets, Freek de Jonge, and Micha Wertheim, tend to disassociate themselves from an explicit political engagement. By challenging the dominant image of the Dutch comedian as a ‘progressive rebel,’ this thesis contributes to a better understanding of humour in the present cultural moment, in which humour is often either not taken seriously, or one-sidedly celebrated as being merely pleasurable, innocent, or progressively liberating. In so doing, this thesis concludes, the ‘dark’ and more conservative sides of humour tend to get obscured

    AIUCD 2022 - Proceedings

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    L’undicesima edizione del Convegno Nazionale dell’AIUCD-Associazione di Informatica Umanistica ha per titolo Culture digitali. Intersezioni: filosofia, arti, media. Nel titolo è presente, in maniera esplicita, la richiesta di una riflessione, metodologica e teorica, sull’interrelazione tra tecnologie digitali, scienze dell’informazione, discipline filosofiche, mondo delle arti e cultural studies

    Pressure training in sport : Factors to enhance design and delivery of applied interventions

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    This thesis examined how sport psychologists can design and deliver pressure training (PT) to maximise PT’s impact on performance in sport. Adopting a pragmatic approach to research, four studies were conducted to provide practitioners with guidance for conducting PT. The first study was a meta-analysis of previous PT interventions. PT had a moderate positive effect on performance under pressure when compared to training without pressure. Building on Stoker et al.’s (2016) framework for creating pressure, the second study identified properties of pressure manipulations that international-level athletes and sport psychologists had found to be effective. This study also explored the specific benefits of PT that lead to improved performance. In the third study, athletes and sport psychologists also described effective delivery of PT. Key findings included processes such as collaboration and integration of PT into training sessions, and these processes may counter risks that PT could pose to athletes’ wellbeing. The fourth study applied the previous findings to a PT intervention with a professional women’s basketball team. Results further extended knowledge on creating pressure and delivering PT. Specifically, pressure may be created more effectively through negative, rather than positive, consequences that have meaningful implications for athletes. This study also highlighted that fully integrating PT into training can include coaches reinforcing pressure manipulations and supporting performance under pressure. Additional applied implications of this thesis include PT’s potential to complement mental skills training and the need to distinguish PT from training that simulates other aspects of competition. Future research can investigate the training environments and characteristics of individuals that are conducive to effective PT. More knowledge on creating pressure is especially needed for team sports because of individual differences within a team. Studies can also test the properties of pressure manipulations that were explored qualitatively in this thesis

    Graphical scaffolding for the learning of data wrangling APIs

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    In order for students across the sciences to avail themselves of modern data streams, they must first know how to wrangle data: how to reshape ill-organised, tabular data into another format, and how to do this programmatically, in languages such as Python and R. Despite the cross-departmental demand and the ubiquity of data wrangling in analytical workflows, the research on how to optimise the instruction of it has been minimal. Although data wrangling as a programming domain presents distinctive challenges - characterised by on-the-fly syntax lookup and code example integration - it also presents opportunities. One such opportunity is how tabular data structures are easily visualised. To leverage the inherent visualisability of data wrangling, this dissertation evaluates three types of graphics that could be employed as scaffolding for novices: subgoal graphics, thumbnail graphics, and parameter graphics. Using a specially built e-learning platform, this dissertation documents a multi-institutional, randomised, and controlled experiment that investigates the pedagogical effects of these. Our results indicate that the graphics are well-received, that subgoal graphics boost the completion rate, and that thumbnail graphics improve navigability within a command menu. We also obtained several non-significant results, and indications that parameter graphics are counter-productive. We will discuss these findings in the context of general scaffolding dilemmas, and how they fit into a wider research programme on data wrangling instruction

    The new age of fear: an analysis of crisis framing by right-wing populist parties in Greece and France

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    From the 2009 Eurozone economic downturn, to the 2015 mass movement of forcibly displaced migrants and the current COVID-19 pandemic, crises have seemingly become a ‘new normal’ feature of European politics. During this decade, rolling crises generated a wave of public discontent that damaged the legitimacy of national governments and the European Union and heralded a renaissance of populism. The central message of populist parties, which helped them rise in popularity or enter parliament for the first time, is simple but very effective: democratic representation has been undermined by national and global elites. This has provoked a wealth of studies seeking to explain the rise or breakthrough of populist fringe parties, without adequate consideration of how crises transform, not only the demand side, but also the supply of populist arguments, which has received scarce attention. This thesis seeks to address this imbalance by synthesising insights from the crisis framing literature, which facilitates an understanding and operationalisation of populism as a style of discourse. To assess how far-right parties employ this discourse, and the implications of this for their electoral prospects, a comparative case-study design is employed, exploring the discourse of parties, the National Rally (NR) in France and Golden Dawn (GD) in Greece. Their ideologically similar profile but differential electoral performance, allows for a more nuanced analysis of their respective framing strategies. The thesis examines the discourse of the two parties MPs on month by month basis over a four year period, 2012-2015 for GD and 2012-2013 and 2016-2017 for NR, via the use of the NVivo software. Their respective discourses are quantified and broken down into four key areas associated with Foreign Policy, the Economy, the Political System and Society, analysing the content, frequency and salience of key crisis frames. Discourse analysis of excerpts adds a qualitative element to the analysis that showcases the substantial differences between the two case studies. The analysis demonstrates that references to ‘the people’ and anti-elitism were the centrepieces of each case study’s discourse with strong nativist and nationalist elements. The two parties were extremely similar in the diagnostic stage of their framing and the way which they attribute blame for the crises. However, their discursive strategies diverge regarding their proposed solutions to the crises. Golden Dawn remained a single issue party in terms of discourse, since it never presented a comprehensive plan for ending the crises. As a result, Golden Dawn’s discourse remained one-dimensional throughout its brief period of success, being centred solely on attributing blame and attacking its political opponents and the European Union. On the other hand, National Rally’s framing was more elaborate and ambitious both in terms of the variety of issues raised and, especially, the proposed solutions if advocated. This, it is argued, contributed to the evolution of RN into a mainstream competitor that is no longer dependent on a niche part of the electoral market, while the inability of GD to develop equally successful crisis frames offers a unique understanding as to why the party failed electorally and was unable to enter Parliament in the 2019 elections. The overall analysis produces a rich framework that maps out the key elements of populist crisis discourse by far-right parties, which has implications for electoral politics and for our understanding of populism, more broadly
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