3,012 research outputs found

    Stay-at-home Fathers in Contemporary Urban China

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    This research investigates stay-at-home fathers (SAHFs) as an emerging gendered identity in contemporary urban China. Being a SAHF constitutes an unconventional gender role in China, which has been marginalised by longstanding prejudice against men who are not the main wage-earners in the family unit. My scrutiny of the discourse surrounding this new role contributes to existing literature on the social production of gender difference and hierarchy in urban China. This research is particularly significant now, at a time when gender inequalities in China coexist with an increasingly individualistic culture, and yet these inequalities remain largely unaddressed by government discourse and often reinforced through popular discourse. This research seeks to answer three questions: What motivates men to become SAHFs? How do they perceive, experience, and enact their role as SAHFs? How does the construction of SAHF masculinity intersect with changing representations of urban family life and masculinity in contemporary urban China? To address these three interrelated questions, I examine three sources of data about SAHFs – TV dramas, social media articles, and interviews – focusing on how SAHFs’ perceptions, experiences, and practices are understood both by SAHFs themselves and wider society. Current research on SAHFs has been predominantly focused on the Global North to the extent that this is the first research on SAHFs in mainland China that focuses on how multiple discourses contribute to the construction and reconstruction of familial masculinity and wider family relations. By highlighting the plurality and ongoing reconfiguration of masculinity that has emerged from my three data sources, I show how discourse produced by and about SAHFs not only sustains but also sometimes transforms conventional notions of gender. In doing so, my research adds new perspectives to existing literature on Chinese masculinities and family life, as well as studies of SAHFs and the family in other countries

    Colossal Trajectory Mining: A unifying approach to mine behavioral mobility patterns

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    Spatio-temporal mobility patterns are at the core of strategic applications such as urban planning and monitoring. Depending on the strength of spatio-temporal constraints, different mobility patterns can be defined. While existing approaches work well in the extraction of groups of objects sharing fine-grained paths, the huge volume of large-scale data asks for coarse-grained solutions. In this paper, we introduce Colossal Trajectory Mining (CTM) to efficiently extract heterogeneous mobility patterns out of a multidimensional space that, along with space and time dimensions, can consider additional trajectory features (e.g., means of transport or activity) to characterize behavioral mobility patterns. The algorithm is natively designed in a distributed fashion, and the experimental evaluation shows its scalability with respect to the involved features and the cardinality of the trajectory dataset

    Expert Ignorance:The Law and Politics of Rule of Law Reform

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    Hierarchical accompanying and inhibiting patterns on the spatial arrangement of taxis' local hotspots

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    Due to the large volume of recording, the complete spontaneity, and the flexible pick-up and drop-off locations, taxi data portrays a realistic and detailed picture of urban space use to a certain extent. The spatial arrangement of pick-up and drop-off hotspots reflects the organizational space, which has received attention in urban structure studies. Previous studies mainly explore the hotspots at a large scale by visual analysis or some simple indexes, where the hotspots usually cover the entire central business district, train stations, or dense residential areas, reaching a radius of hundreds or even thousands of meters. However, the spatial arrangement patterns of small-scale hotspots, reflecting the specific popular pick-up and drop-off locations, have not received much attention. Using two taxi trajectory datasets in Wuhan and Beijing, China, this study quantitatively explores the spatial arrangement of fine-grained pick-up and drop-off local hotspots with different levels of popularity, where the sizes are adaptively set as 90m*90m in Wuhan and 105m*105m in Beijing according to the local hotspot identification method. Results show that popular hotspots tend to be surrounded by less popular hotspots, but the existence of less popular hotspots is inhibited in regions with a large number of popular hotspots. We use the terms hierarchical accompany and inhibiting patterns for these two spatial configurations. Finally, to uncover the underlying mechanism, a KNN-based model is proposed to reproduce the spatial distribution of other less popular hotspots according to the most popular ones. These findings help decision-makers construct reasonable urban minimum units for precise traffic and disease control, as well as plan a more humane spatial arrangement of points of interest

    Subtitling Francophone World Cinema: Narratives of Identity, Alterity and Power in Audiovisual Translation

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    Cinematic representations of multilingualism raise questions about communication and mutual understanding not only between characters in films but also between films and their audiences, for whom it is typically necessary to facilitate access to foreign dialogues through different forms of translation. Where languages are pitted against one another, however, or juxtaposed in ways that serve to reveal and explore tensions and hierarchies between different linguistic, cultural and social groups, translation becomes entangled in issues of identity, alterity and power. This thesis untangles and explores these complex interactions between languages and translation as they arise in the practice of subtitling. Specifically, it asks questions about how subtitling can play an active part in the shaping of identity by mediating differences between the local, the national and the global, and how subtitles intersect with the relations of power that exist between different cultures. In turn, the thesis exposes the semiotic and narrative dynamics that subtitles add to films and considers the implications of these findings for the ways we think of audiovisual translation and of its relationship with creative processes and accessibility practices. These questions are considered in the context of multilingualism, not only because issues of language, identity and power relations are inextricably involved in discussions thereof, but because multilingualism is an increasingly common experience for many subtitlers and film audiences alike. This is particularly true of francophone world cinema, from whose corpus the thesis analyses six films across three case studies: Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (Dany Boon 2008), L’esquive (Abdellatif Kechiche 2003), Inch’Allah dimanche (Yamina Benguigui 2001), Dheepan (Jacques Audiard 2015), Le grand voyage (Ismaël Ferroukhi 2004) and Exils (Tony Gatlif 2004). Methodologically, the thesis combines semiotic, narrative, and linguistic analysis of the subtitled audiovisual texts, drawing on a range of perspectives within Audiovisual Translation Studies, Postcolonial Translation Studies, Film Studies, French and Francophone Studies and Cultural Studies

    Resilience and food security in a food systems context

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    This open access book compiles a series of chapters written by internationally recognized experts known for their in-depth but critical views on questions of resilience and food security. The book assesses rigorously and critically the contribution of the concept of resilience in advancing our understanding and ability to design and implement development interventions in relation to food security and humanitarian crises. For this, the book departs from the narrow beaten tracks of agriculture and trade, which have influenced the mainstream debate on food security for nearly 60 years, and adopts instead a wider, more holistic perspective, framed around food systems. The foundation for this new approach is the recognition that in the current post-globalization era, the food and nutritional security of the world’s population no longer depends just on the performance of agriculture and policies on trade, but rather on the capacity of the entire (food) system to produce, process, transport and distribute safe, affordable and nutritious food for all, in ways that remain environmentally sustainable. In that context, adopting a food system perspective provides a more appropriate frame as it incites to broaden the conventional thinking and to acknowledge the systemic nature of the different processes and actors involved. This book is written for a large audience, from academics to policymakers, students to practitioners

    Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies across Europe: Understanding Sharing and Caring

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    "Sharing economy" and "collaborative economy" refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models, digital platforms and forms of work that characterise contemporary life: from community-led initiatives and activist campaigns, to the impact of global sharing platforms in contexts such as network hospitality, transportation, etc. Sharing the common lens of ethnographic methods, this book presents in-depth examinations of collaborative economy phenomena. The book combines qualitative research and ethnographic methodology with a range of different collaborative economy case studies and topics across Europe. It uniquely offers a truly interdisciplinary approach. It emerges from a unique, long-term, multinational, cross-European collaboration between researchers from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, geography, business studies, law, computing, information systems), career stages, and epistemological backgrounds, brought together by a shared research interest in the collaborative economy. This book is a further contribution to the in-depth qualitative understanding of the complexities of the collaborative economy phenomenon. These rich accounts contribute to the painting of a complex landscape that spans several countries and regions, and diverse political, cultural, and organisational backdrops. This book also offers important reflections on the role of ethnographic researchers, and on their stance and outlook, that are of paramount interest across the disciplines involved in collaborative economy research

    The Politics of Platformization: Amsterdam Dialogues on Platform Theory

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    What is platformization and why is it a relevant category in the contemporary political landscape? How is it related to cybernetics and the history of computation? This book tries to answer such questions by engaging in multidisciplinary dialogues about the first ten years of the emerging fields of platform studies and platform theory. It deploys a narrative and playful approach that makes use of anecdotes, personal histories, etymologies, and futurable speculations to investigate both the fragmented genealogy that led to platformization and the organizational and economic trends that guide nowadays platform sociotechnical imaginaries
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