Gaywaves: Transcending Boundaries - the Rise and Demise of Britain's First Gay Radio Program

At the beginning of 1982 an array of conflicting forces were working to shape the landscape of Europe's metropolitan radio services, and to alternatively control, commodify or liberate its gay communities. This paper examines the drivers, which inspired Gaywaves, a nascent weekly gay community radio programme broadcasting to an inner London audience on pirate station Our Radio from May 1982 until March 1983

Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium

Transnationalizing Radio Research presents a theoretical and methodological guide for exploring radio's multiple »global ages«, from its earliest years through its recent digital transformations. It offers radio scholars theoretical tools and concrete case studies for moving beyond national research frames. It gives radio practitioners inspiration for production and archiving, and offers scholars from many disciplines new ways to incorporate radio's vital voices into work on transnational institutions, communities, histories and identities

#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation

"Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. #identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.

Social Movements and Politics during COVID-19

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Bringing together leading authors in the sociology and social movement fields from all continents, this unique book explores both the global echoes of the pandemic and the different local and national responses adopted by different actors. The authors reveal how the pandemic exacerbates inequalities across the world whilst opening up new solidarities and hopes for a better future

Brain Waves, A Cultural History: Oscillations of Neuroscience, Technology, Telepathy, and Transcendence

This project proceeds from a narrow question: What, if anything, is a brain wave? Beguiling in its simplicity, this question prompts a cultural-historical investigation that spans over 150 years of science, technology, and society. Proposed in 1869, the original theory of brain waves cites etheric undulations to explain reports of apparent thought transference. Though most modern thinkers no longer believe in outright telepathy, I argue that dreams of thought transmission and other mental miracles subtly persist—not in obscure and occult circles, but at the forefront of technoscience. A hybrid of science and fiction, brain waves represent an ideal subject through which to explore the ways in which technical language shrouds spiritual dreams. Today, the phrase “brain waves” often function as shorthand for electrical changes in the brain, particularly in the context of technologies that purport to “read” some aspect of mental function, or to transmit neural data to a digital device. While such technologies appear uniquely modern, the history of brain waves reveals that they are merely the millennial incarnation of a much older hope—a hope for transmission and transcendence via the brain’s emanations

Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data

This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data

Transnational Modern Languages

In a world increasingly defined by the transnational and translingual, and by the pressures of globalization, it has become difficult to study culture as primarily a national phenomenon. A Handbook offers students across Modern Languages an introduction to the kind of methodological questions they need to look at culture transnationally. Each of the short essays takes a key concept in cultural study and suggests how it might be used to explore and illuminate some aspect of identity, mobility, translation, and cultural exchange across borders. The authors range over different language areas and their wide chronological reach provides broad coverage, as well as a flexible and practical methodology for studying cultures in a transnational framework. The essays show that an inclusive, transnational vision and practice of Modern Languages is central to understanding human interaction in an inclusive, globalized society. A Handbook stands as an effective and necessary theoretical and thematically diverse glossary and companion to the ‘national’ volumes in the series

Synergy between Government and Small Business

Small businesses provide a means for individuals with limited resources to earn a living and they contribute toward the versatility of urban economies, but these businesses typically have a short life cycle and the majority do not last more than 5 years. Therefore, to compete and survive, business owners rely on numerous sources of support such as their personal networks while governments also offer support through policies and programs. This dissertation examines the interaction between the government and very small businesses. One school of thought claims that support from the government displaces the support provided by private networks, while another theory claims that the role of the government actually stimulates private support, i.e. the relationship is synergistic. This study acknowledges that both dynamics are possible, and focuses on exploring the channels through which the government connects with small businesses. This study looks closely at Singapore where the government has arguably played an active role in the nation’s rapid economic development. Primary data was collected through qualitative interviews with business owners, community leaders, and government officials, and participant observation at business sites including hawker centers and startup incubators. Transcripts from parliamentary debates and policy reports provide a historical and contemporary perspective for the analysis. Three major theoretical streams inform this dissertation: social network analysis, new institutionalism, and the synergy thesis. Together, these theories illuminate the context in which small businesses operate, but they also expose the need for further research on how synergistic relations might operate between private networks and the government. The innovation in this research is to examine the role of bridging institutions in society where support from the government links with existent private networks to optimize the success of small businesses. This study illuminates the discourse on government intervention by drawing attention to the role and emergence of institutions in the “meso-sphere” and particular ways in which they interact and blend with both the State (macro) and society (micro) that allow different types of synergy to operate, such as coordinating synergy, delegating synergy, and steering synergy and by analyzing where the locus of agency is situated in the institutional system

For Rochdale: reading, mapping, and writing place in the era of the northern powerhouse

The aim of this thesis is to explore the way in which popular perceptions Rochdale, a town and borough in Greater Manchester, can be challenged and reconfigured through a range of critical and creative practices. Using the Northern Powerhouse project – an initiative introduced by George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer – as a starting point, this thesis argues that the language of the Northern Powerhouse is invidiously insubstantial: it is a vague rhetoric of regeneration which is inextricably indexed to top-down place-making practices. The research has a multifaceted approach and utilises methodologies from the fields of literary and creative geographies to critically, and creatively, explore how a place is made through literary texts, maps and new writing. The thesis is organised in a tripartite structure: Reading Place, Mapping Place and Writing Place. Chapter One presents theories of place which underpin the analysis of the literary texts. In Chapter Two a literary survey of poetry, prose, folk tales, and plays is used to pull out some of the key themes and tropes in extant writing about Rochdale. The second part introduces critical cartography. Chapter Three starts from J. Brian Harley’s premise that maps are a form of text that reveal and conceal what Michel de Certeau calls spatial stories. Following a discussion of ‘official’ maps of Rochdale, new maps are made, and explored, in Chapter Four. The final part features a discussion on practice-as-research and exegeses of the creative work. Crucially, creative literary and artistic responses are scattered throughout the thesis, interrupting the expected narrative of traditional critical research. This experimental, hybrid approach demonstrates the complexities of Rochdale. This research contributes to nascent geohumanities scholarship and practice that explores the intertwining and blurred boundaries within (and without) the normally siloed fields of the arts, humanities, and sciences. Rochdale is not a cultural lacuna, and the imaginative approach offered by my thesis challenges the “business as usual” narratives posed by regeneration organisations and the language of the Northern Powerhouse