Performing Whale-Watching in Juneau, Alaska

Nature-based tourism activities provide special contexts for human-wildlife interaction. In Juneau, Alaska, summertime tourists seek encounters with humpback whales, hundreds of which feed seasonally in Southeast Alaska’s coastal waterways. Tourists support a thriving whale-watching industry in the region. Voices in nature-based tourism studies, departing from prior rigid conceptualizations of tourism, have identified the need to investigate activities using innovative frameworks to address the tourism experience as an ongoing and fluidly constructed phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to construct a new understanding of nature-based tourism using a performance metaphor. The flexibility provided in a metaphorical approach allows for a return to the geographical basis of space in both tangible and intangible forms. A set of in-depth interviews with Juneau whale-watching customers and industry professionals reveal how space is portrayed, navigated, and experienced during whale-watching. Here these elements appear as performative components of script, stage, and action. The whale-watching performance involves a lively and often awe-inspiring stage upon which human and non-human actors interact. Results uncover how such a production in wild spaces may produce an immersive wildlife experience

In search of chiefly authority in ‘post-aid’ Acholiland : transformations of customary authorities in northern Uganda

This paper investigates the complex relation between protracted donor interventions and the production of customary authority. More specifically, the paper analyses the impact of post-conflict donor interventions (and their withdrawal) on the position of customary chiefs in the Acholi region in northern Uganda. As important brokers between international aid agencies, the Ugandan government and Acholi communities, customary chiefs became key actors in post-conflict peacebuilding programmes. Using the concepts of extraversion and development brokerage, the paper demonstrates how dwindling access to external donor funds has strongly affected Acholi customary authority. To secure their authority and legitimacy, customary chiefs re-shifted from an 'outward' to an 'inward' orientation, a process that we call 'introversion

Computer-Mediated Communication and Ecclesiological Challenges To and From the Reformed Tradition

Communities of faith have appeared online since the inception of computer -­ mediated communication (CMC)and are now ubiquitous. Yet the character and legitimacy of Internet communities as ecclesial bodies is often disputed by traditional churches; and the Internet's ability to host the church as church for online Christians remains a question. This dissertation carries out a practical theological conversation between three main sources: the phenomenon of the church online; ecclesiology (especially that characteristic of Reformed communities); and communication theory. After establishing the need for this study in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 investigates the online presence of Christians and trends in their Internet use, including its history and current expressions. Chapter 3 sets out an historical overview of the Reformed Tradition, focusing on the work of John Calvin and Karl Barth, as well as more contemporary theologians. With a theological context in which to consider online churches in place, Chapter 4 introduces four theological themes prominent in both ecclesiology and CMC studies: authority; community; mediation; and embodiment. These themes constitute the primary lens through which the dissertation conducts a critical-­confessional interface between communication theory and ecclesiology in the examination of CMC. Chapter 5 continues the contextualization of online churches with consideration of communication theories that impact CMC, focusing on three major communication theories: Narrative Theory; Interpretive Theory; and Speech Act Theory. Chapter 6 contains the critical conversation between ecclesiology and communication theory by correlating the aforementioned communication theories with Narrative Theology, Communities of Practice, and Theo-­Drama, and applying these to the four theological themes noted above. In addition, new or anticipated developments in CMC investigated in relationship to traditional ecclesiologies and the prospect of cyber-­ecclesiology. Chapter 7 offers an evaluative tool consisting of a three-­step hermeneutical process that examines: 1) the history, tradition, and ecclesiology of the particular community being evaluated; 2) communication theories and the process of religious-­social shaping of technology; and 3) CMC criteria for establishing the presence of a stable, interactive, and relational community. As this hermeneutical process unfolds, it holds the church at the center of the process, seeking a contextual yet faithful understanding of the church

Protest Beyond Representation: The Vitalism of Digital Protest Art\u27s Political Aesthetics

The complexities of post-modernity tend to dissolve any facile model of direct cause-and-effect in politics, and yet as a democratic polity, we look for the comfort in knowing that political expression can enact change. Protest art, or acts of creative expression intended to resist dominant powers, forces, and structures, models the potential for political expression to create change that is not immediate, direct, or obvious, but rather moves the social through expressivity and aesthetics. While these features lend themselves to an analysis guided by affect theory, this sub-discipline within communication studies has tended to lack the methodological specificity to reproduce or expand applications. Daniel Stern\u27s vitality pentad acts as a heuristic by which to study rhetorical objects; these objects are studied due to their expressivity, rather than their appeal to reason. Stern excludes still media forms such as photographs and illustrations; however, by looking at the way in which digital artifacts are imbued with movement in its networked path, we can understand that all digital media are time-based. The objects of study speak to the temporal, vital dimensions of digital protest art: Turkey\u27s Vandalina art collective, which places protest stickers on transit cars, demonstrates how force and scale engender feeling of intimacy in public spaces. Iran\u27s Zahra\u27s Paradise, a webcomic-turned-graphic novel, offers differing temporal environments for the reader and weaves its aesthetics into the narrative to create a sense of space and place. Finally, the images of #HandsUpDontShoot, through their directional pull across digital networks, illustrates social media\u27s tendency to remix aesthetic features of older media forms. Major insights drawn from this research speak to the political importance of subject formation--or interventions therein--and vitality forms as a method for rhetorical criticism, which allows the rhetorical critic to be more specific and methodical in applying affect theory to rhetoric. It also challenges the positivist notion that political expression must result in measurable change in order to be validated. Finally, this project addresses the virtual potentiality of digital data and offers a perspective that sees all digital media as time-based

Space, place, and the self: reimagining selfies as thirdspace

The rise of digital and visual communication has brought an increased focus to the places that people occupy. While places are created through various meaning-making processes, one way of establishing the meaning of a place is by inserting oneself into spaces by taking selfies. The places depicted in selfies may reflect a desire to associate oneself with the place, to make a statement challenging that place or the dominant meaning associated with it, or to create new meaning concerning the place and the self. Drawing on the concepts of Thirdspace and heterotopias, we proffer a framework for the practice of taking and sharing selfies that depict a place. We argue that people colonize points in space to reproduce, counter, or mix the meanings of places. People then both draw from and contribute to the construction of places and are motivated to “place” themselves to provide alternative or personalized perspectives of these places but also to represent their self.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio