Mobile Activism, Material Imaginings, and the Ethics of the Edible: Framing Political Engagement through the Buycott App

In this article, we explore the discursive constructions of Buycott, a free mobile app that provides a platform for user-generated ethical consumption campaigns. Unlike other ethical consumption apps, Buycott’s mode of knowledge production positions the app itself as neutral, with app users generating activist campaigns and providing both data and judgment. Although Buycott is not a dedicated food activism app, food features centrally in its campaigns, and the app seems to provide a mobile means of extending, and perhaps expanding, alternative food network (AFN) action across geographies and constituencies. Thus, as a case study, Buycott unveils contemporary possibilities for citizen participation and the formation of activist consumer communities, both local and trans-national, through mobile technologies. Our analysis shows, however, that despite the app’s user-generated format, the forms of activism it enables are constrained by the app’s binary construction of action as non/consumption and its guiding ‘mission’ of ‘voting with your wallet’. Grounded in texts concerning Buycott’s two largest campaigns (Demand GMO Labeling and Long live Palestine boycott Israel), our analysis delineates how Buycott, its campaigns, and its modes of action take shape in user, media, and app developer discourses. We find that, as discursively framed, Buycott campaigns are commodity-centric, invoking an ‘ethics of care’ to be enacted by atomized consumers, in corporate spaces and through mainstream, barcode-bearing, retail products. In user discourses, this corporate spatiality translates into the imagined materializing of issues in products, investing commodities with the substance of an otherwise ethereal cause. This individualized, commodity-centric activism reinforces tenets of the neoliberal market, ultimately turning individual users into consumers not only of products, but also of the app itself. Thus, we suggest, the activist habitus constructed through Buycott is a neoliberal, consumer habitus

The discourses of OERs: how flat is this world?

This paper proposes Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2000) as a tool for identifying the various discourses that can be found in the provision of open educational resources. The argument will be built upon the concept of a 'flat world', a powerful metaphor used by Friedman in his famous book 'The World is Flat' (2005). The discussion will draw upon concepts of critical discourse analysis to explore sample data from open educational resources (OERs) initiatives, and will investigate the degree to which such initiatives have a 'flattening' effect in terms of widening participation and empowering individuals through access to knowledge

Remote from what? Perspectives of distance learning students in remote rural areas of Scotland

Distance learning is seen as the obvious answer for remote learners, and the use of online media is expected to overcome any access difficulties imposed by geographical distance. However, this belief may be obscuring our understanding of the role that location and individual circumstances have in shaping student experience. This paper explores the variation in experiences of remote rural students who study with the Open University (UK). The researchers found that perceptions of remoteness depended on geography, but were also relative to individual circumstances. With respect to students’ sense of connection with university staff and peers, most mentioned their contact with their personal tutor. Networks with peers were less common, a matter of concern if peer networks are integral to fostering improved retention and progression. In this particular context, distance education may be playing an important and distinctive role for remote students by providing opportunities for connections with like-minded people

Platform, culture, identities: exploring young people's game-making

Digital games are an important component in the contemporary media landscape. They are cultural artefacts and, as such, are subjected to specific conventions. These conventions shape our imaginary about games, defining, for example, what a game is, who can play them and where. Different research has been developed to understand and challenge these conventions, and one of the strategies often adopted is fostering game-making among “gaming minorities”. By popularising games and their means of production, critical skills towards these objects could be developed, these conventions could be fought, and our perceptions of those artefacts could be transformed. Nevertheless, digital games, as obvious as it sounds, are also digital: they depend on technology to exist and are subjected to different technologies’ affordances and constraints. Technologies, however, are not neutral and objective, but are also cultural: they too are influenced by values and conventions. This means that, even if the means of production of digital games are distributed among more diverse groups, we should not ignore the role played by technology in this process of shaping our imaginary about games. Cultural and technical aspects of digital media are not, therefore, as conflicting as it might seem, finding themselves entangled in digital games. They are also equally influential in our understanding and our cultural uses of these artefacts; but how influential are they? How easy can one go against cultural and technical conventions when producing a game as a non-professional? Can anyone make any kind of game? In this research, I explore young people’s game-making practices in non-professional contexts to understand how repertoires, gaming conventions and platform affordances and constraints can be influential in this creative process. I organised two different game-making clubs for young people in London/UK (one at a community-led centre for Latin American migrants and other at a comprehensive primary school). The clubs consisted in a series of workshops offered in a weekly basis, totalling a minimum of 12 hours of instruction/production at each research site. The participants were aged between 11 and 18 and produced a total of 11 games across these two sites with MissionMaker, a software that facilitates the creation of 3D games by non-specialists through ready-made 3D assets, custom audio and image files, and a simplified drop-down-list-based scripting language. Three games and their production teams were selected as case studies and investigated through qualitative methods and under a descriptive-interpretive approach. Throughout the game-making clubs, short surveys, observations, unstructured and semi-structured interviews and a game archive (with week-by-week saves of participants’ games) were employed to generate data that was then analysed through a Multimodal Sociosemiotics framework to explore how cultural and technical conventions were appropriated by participants during this experience. Discourses, gaming conventions and MissionMaker’s affordances and constraints were appropriated in different ways by participants in the process of game production, culminating in the realisation of different discourses and the construction of diverse identities. These results are relevant since they restate the value of a more holistic approach – one that looks at both culture and technology – to critical videogame production within non-professional contexts. These results are also useful to the mapping of the influence of repertoires, conventions and platforms in non-professional game-making contexts, highlighting how these elements are influential but at the same time not prescriptive to the games produced, and how game development processes within these contexts are better understood as dialogical

Sub-alterities: schooling in Southern Italy

The article analyses the circularity of symbolic and structural forms of domination, feeding the field of expertise, and the school field in a country such as Italy, historically characterised by a deep divide between north and south; this led to the emergence of the so-called Southern Question. We aim to bring into the international debate the existence of a South in a European country which is usually and univocally con- sidered to belong to the North. The analysis is structured around two main interconnected dimensions: 1) the macro-dimension of knowl- edge production where we show how, when analysing the experience of schooling, if the structure of the field itself and its logic of domination are not challenged, any critical epistemological discourse is destined to become a form of structural complicity with the intrinsic logic of the academic field; 2) the micro-dimension of school experience: schools, families and students engage and participate in the educational field, are part of it, adhere to its rules of play and struggle to ‘exist’ in its interstices

Lecturers' accounts of their curriculum practices at a university of technology

This article focuses on lectures’ accounts of their curriculum practices at a University of Technology (UoT). Based on semi-structured interviews with lecturers, it examines their engagement with the curriculum and the practices they adopt to ensure student learning. I draw on Bourdieu’s (1990) concepts of field, reflexivity, illusio and doxa to highlight the lecturers’ ability to negotiate the university’s field and the reflexive stances they adopt to change and adapt their teaching practices. The article highlights the importance of cultivating reflexivity in academic staff development programmes and the need to strengthen lecturers’ reflexivity at UoTs. The article’s findings show the tension lecturers experience between teaching and research and the subordinate role of research in their curriculum practices. The article discusses the lecturers’ commitment to the curriculum’s values and shows that these factors were crucial in developing lecturer agency and reflexivity. The lecturers’ beliefs about their teaching and pedagogical strategies they utilised are discussed as a part of their curriculum practices. These were critical in establishing their agency and in producing innovative curriculum practices. My research shows the significance of utilising information communication technologies (ICTs) by the lecturers as a pedagogical strategy in the enactment of the curriculum.

Framing sustainable consumerism in the retail market

The pressure on retail businesses to be a part of, or even lead, the transition into a more sustainable world is putting a lot of pressure on the wholesale market. The debate on whom the responsibility should fall on is divided between consumers, the government, and companies. Retail businesses do nevertheless play a significant role in society by shaping how and what behavior consumers have. Earlier studies in the retail and wholesale industry revolve around supplier chains, sustainable food, ecological food, and consumer behavior. This thesis is a case study of Axfood which aimed to identify different frames of sustainable consumerism. The study used frame theory to analyze the findings through a frame analysis. Three frames were found in the analysis; sustainable consumers, change processes, and actor constellations. The findings of the sustainable consumerism frame were that they viewed consumers as price oriented and not enough informed about the climate crisis. Without engagement from consumers, companies cannot create a market for sustainable consumerism. The framed solution was a need for political and systematic societal changes to create lower prices on sustainable products so that consumers can afford these products. The change process frame mentioned the lack of governmental support in favor of creating the necessary change. The framed solution was to create more political responsibility, taxes, and funds to create long-term change in the wholesale and retail business. The final frame was the actor constellation which presented a lack of engagement in the industry. Saying that one company can not create the big movement needed to change unsustainable consumerism in the retail industry. Creating a joint engagement in the industry, stakeholders, and government and having similar goals in their business plans was the presented solution. The engagement for a sustainable future is present within the retail industry but is silenced by pricing, individualism, and the fixed structures in today's society, a truly wicked problem

Constitutive Memories Of City Space: Rhetorics Of Civil Rights Memory In Detroit’s Urban Landscape

This dissertation examines public memories of civil rights injustice and resistance as constitutive rhetorics of urban culture and spatiality for the city of Detroit. By studying the city of Detroit as it navigates an ongoing period of dramatic change and redevelopment, this study demonstrates how material manifestations of memory become the constitutive forces that define what many describe as “Detroit’s heart and soul.” This project illustrates the embedded cultural logics produced from sites of public memory, thereby arguing city spaces as locations bound to their legacies and beholden to material and symbolic consequences of their past. This dissertation proceeds through four analytical focuses on memory sites in Detroit, demonstrating the mnemonic features of haunting memory, emergent memory, forgetting, and disruptive memory that mold the city space as a whole. While previous scholarship on the relationship between memory, rhetoric, and cities introduces the network of mnemonic narratives that produce our singular ideological frameworks, they fail to extend such conclusions to complicated cultural amalgamations, such as city spaces and the cultures that define them. This dissertation closes with a look to Detroit’s future and an extended conclusion detailing the cautions that Detroit’s public memories of the civil rights struggle suggest, particularly in the context of ongoing controversies in contemporary Detroit. From the cases explored across this project, the author argues Detroit and city spaces like it are a social, assemblage of cultural palimpsests, spaces bound to public memories that continue to shape, inform, and influence the manner in which these locations move forward

Young people (re)conceptualising digital citizenship: Constructing ways of being and doing citizen(ship) 'online'

This thesis explores how meaningful the concept of digital citizenship is to young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. In an increasingly digitally-mediated society, the way young people learn what it means to be a citizen online, and the behaviours consistent with belonging and connecting to digitally-mediated communities, are increasingly important. Digital citizenship, however, is an evolving concept. Digital citizenship arises when the inherent complexity of the notion of ‘citizenship’ intersects with the interrelational spaces offered by digital technologies and as a result makes possible new ways of being a citizen and doing citizen(ship) practices. In education, definitions of digital citizenship construct an ‘ideal’ digital citizen by outlining desired behaviours, dispositions, and skills, which normalise particular ways of being and doing. How meaningful idealised concepts are to young people, and whether definitions align with young people’s understanding of what it means to be a digitally-mediated citizen, has not been fully examined in New Zealand. To explore how meaningful the concept of digital citizenship is to young people, this thesis operates at a theoretical junction, drawing upon multiple historical conceptualisations of citizenship (see for example, Heater, 2004; Mutch, 2005), understandings of discourses (Foucault, 1972), notions of space and place (Massey, 2005), and Bourdieu’s theory of practice (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), specifically notions of capital and habitus. Taking a qualitative approach, I conducted focus groups and individual interviews with 28 young people, aged between 16 and 25, from diverse backgrounds. The resulting data were analysed using an iterative, inductive approach to explore young people’s meaning-making and ways of being and doing digital citizenship. These findings are presented in four parts that focus upon the way young people defined, shaped, located, and practised their citizenship and digital citizenship. The findings show that digital citizenship is indeed, “many things to many people” (Vivienne, McCosker, & Johns, 2016, p. 15). While ‘digital citizenship’ was a new term for participants, they drew upon their understandings of citizenship to define digital citizenship as habitus (or ways of being) that, along with digital capital, is embodied through digitally-mediated practices. They located their digital citizen habitus through their sense of belonging and connectedness to places and spaces, and they embodied their digital citizen habitus through practices that reflected their lived realities. For these young people, digital citizenship was a fluid and nuanced process of digitally-mediated, participatory citizenship practices informed by everyday lived experiences. I argue that, if ‘digital citizenship’ is to be meaningful for young people, there is a need for educators to recognise young people as experts on their lived realities, to encourage reflection upon taken-for-granted digital practices and spaces, and to highlight the relational aspects of citizenship practices online and offline. While the young people in this study offered definitions of digital citizenship, creating a meaningful and shared concept requires a youth-centric approach that recognises everyday citizenship practices and empowers young people to co-construct ways of being and doing citizen(ship) in digitally-mediated spaces