The Cowl - v.77 - n.2 - Sep 13, 2012

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 77 - No. 2 - September 13, 2012. 24 pages

TikTok Videos as a Platform for Political Education among Overseas Filipino Workers in Qatar

This thesis examined the use of TikTok videos as a platform for political education among overseas Filipino voters in Qatar during the May 2022 elections. With the increasing popularity and influence of social media in political discourse, this study aimed to explore the potential of TikTok as a tool for engaging and informing voters, particularly the overseas Filipino community residing in Qatar. Through an internet survey approach, data was collected from a sample of 1.5% registered voters in Qatar, focusing on their perception and behavioral intention towards using TikTok for political education. The study revealed optimistic perceptions among respondents, highlighting the effectiveness of TikTok's visual and interactive features in disseminating political information. However, the study also acknowledges limitations, including the small sample size and the need for further investigation into specific candidates or political parties. The research emphasizes the need for future studies to examine the influence of TikTok on voting patterns and expand the scope to include a larger sample size and multiple social media platforms

A manifesto for the creative economy

The UK\u27s creative economy is one of its great national strengths, historically deeply rooted and accounting for around one-tenth of the whole economy. It provides jobs for 2.5 million people – more than in financial services, advanced manufacturing or construction – and in recent years, this creative workforce has grown four times faster than the workforce as a whole. But behind this success lies much disruption and business uncertainty, associated with digital technologies. Previously profitable business models have been swept away, young companies from outside the UK have dominated new internet markets, and some UK creative businesses have struggled to compete. UK policymakers too have failed to keep pace with developments in North America and parts of Asia. But it is not too late to refresh tired policies. This manifesto sets out our 10-point plan to bolster one of the UK\u27s fastest growing sectors

Development Asia

Beneath the gloss of Asia’s newfound prosperity lies an unsettling reality. Rising inequality has denied the benefits of Asia’s economic growth to many millions of its citizens. The problem is worsening as the region’s rich get richer much faster than the poor, who miss out on the income, education, and health care they need to lead fulfilling lives. In this issue’s Special Report, Development Asia examines Asia’s widening inequality from many different perspectives. We look at the role of globalization in producing inequality, and consider the disputed relationship between inequality and economic growth. Asia isn’t the only region suffering from a wealth gap, but unlike others it has failed so far to narrow the divide. Most of its large economies have shown rising income inequality since the 1990s, and rural poverty is outpacing urban poverty across much of the continent. If left unchecked, the consequences of this trend could be dire. Palaniappan Chidambaram, the Government of India Finance Minister, provides unique insights into India’s experience with inequality in a fascinating question-and-answer session. In a forthright opinion piece, former World Bank chief economist Justin Yifu Lin delivers his prescription for tackling inequality in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). We discuss how some countries have managed to sidestep the inequality trap, and reveal how others like Cambodia have made progress in curbing the symptoms of inequality— in this case child mortality. Rounding out our cover package is a central question: What can be done about inequality? While some characterize inequality as a phase on the path to prosperity, an emerging consensus suggests otherwise and highlights the importance of inclusive, jobs-rich growth. In our Features section, we venture into Asia’s sprawling slums for a closeup look at how hope—and economies— can take root amid the squalor. Many slums are now vital hubs in the broader economy of their cities, a positive step but one that complicates plans for slum redevelopment. Closing this issue is Black & White, a new section that provides a space for some of Asia’s leading photographers to display their work on a specific development project or theme. In this issue, Filipino photographer Veejay Villafranca spent time with the garbage-pickers of Manila’s Smokey Mountain waste dump. Veejay’s powerful image, on page 56, and the story of a project trying to improve the lives of the pickers, suggests it was time well spent

Gaming Business Communities: Developing online learning organisations to foster communities, develop leadership, and grow interpersonal education

This paper explores, through observation and testing, what possibilities from gaming can be extended into other realms of human interaction to help bring people together, extend education, and grow business. It uses through action learning within the safety of the virtual world within Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Further, I explore how the world of online gaming provides opportunity to train a wide range of skills through extending Revans’ (1980) learning equation and action inquiry methodology. This equation and methodology are deployed in relation to a gaming community to see if the theories could produce strong relationships within organisations and examine what learning, if any, is achievable. I also investigate the potential for changes in business (e.g., employee and customer relationships) through involvement in the gaming community as a unique place to implement action learning. The thesis also asks the following questions on a range of extended possibilities in the world of online gaming: What if the world opened up to a social environment where people could discuss their successes and failures? What if people could take a real world issue and re‐create it in the safe virtual world to test ways of dealing with it? What education answers can the world of online gaming provide

Framing audience prefigurations of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: The roles of fandom, politics and idealised intertexts

Audiences for blockbuster event-film sequels and adaptations often formulate highly developed expectations, motivations, understandings and opinions well before the films are released. A range of intertextual and paratextual influences inform these audience prefigurations, and are believed to frame subsequent audience engagement and response. In our study of prefigurative engagements with Peter Jackson’s 2012 film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we used Q methodology to identify five distinct subjective orientations within the film’s global audience. As this paper illustrates, each group privileges a different set of extratextual referents – notably J.R.R. Tolkien’s original novels, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings film trilogy, highly localised political debates relating to the film’s production, and the previous associations of the film’s various stars. These interpretive frames, we suggest, competed for ascendancy within public and private discourse in the lead up to The Hobbit’s international debut, effectively fragmenting and indeed polarising the film’s prospective global audience

Collaboration and Conflict in Transnationally-Dispersed Zimbabwean Families

Approximately one quarter of Zimbabwean adults left their country of birth during the past twenty years. These sojourners are increasingly dispersed as tightening immigration regimes in preferred destinations and fluctuating global opportunities lead them to places with fewer historical links to Zimbabwe. This dispersive process fractures many families between multiple international locations. Nevertheless, the idea of family remains centrally important to diasporans, who work with relatives around the world to care for children and elders, to acquire important documents like passports, and to prepare for an eventual return home. Following from performative and relational theorizations of kinship, this dissertation argues that collaborative projects are crucibles in which families are forged and reconfigured. This exploration of how dispersion shapes family life deploys three analytical lenses: history, space and technology. Contemporary journeys are historically linked to a century of dispossession and labor-migration in Southern Africa. Colonial governments used onerous “bioinformational regimes” to subjugate Africans and profit from their labor. Today, former colonial powers deploy similar technologies against descendants of subjugated populations in order to restrict access to opportunity that was produced and spatialized through colonial processes. Concurrently, contemporary diasporans build on the “transferable skills” received from previous generations of sojourners. For instance, they use “spatial subterfuge” and “collaborative parenting” to create families of choice—families which may not conform to either indigenous ideals or immigration regimes. Each of the many places where diasporans live is imbued with unique structures of opportunity and oppression. These localized social and economic conditions powerfully influence migrant outcomes and shape how they are able to engage in family projects. People in wealthy countries like Canada and the UK have more economic power than relatives in South Africa or Botswana. Women also find more plentiful opportunities than their husbands and brothers, while younger diasporans tend to fare better than parents and elder siblings. Emergent economic differences may upset expectations about how money and power should be distributed in families. Such disjunctures—combined with the challenge of negotiating overwhelming family needs in the context of scarcity—often leads to conflict between relatives. Distance also results in “separate development” as family members in various locations develop individuated friendships, routines, experiences and even beliefs. These new dimensions of life may be poorly understood by loved ones far away. Today, internet-mediated communications technologies are enabling people in dispersed families to salvage some of this lost relational immediacy. Social media like Facebook enable a degree of passive, contextual monitoring; while group chats on platforms like WhatsApp allow multinational conversations to unfold much as they do over the course of a leisurely weekend visit. New discursive registers like the “meme” even allow pluralistic discussions about important questions of collective interest, as everyone with a claim on being “Zimbabwean” creatively weighs in on the meaning of this identity, and as Zimbabweans of various backgrounds who live in divergent spaces debate whether the spoils of migration are worth its dangers and sacrifices. This dissertation accordingly examines how families negotiate the marked challenges of prolonged separation and international dispersion, and how these efforts relate to negotiations of identity and belonging in the broader Zimbabwean diaspora. These interlinked questions of collaboration and conflict, continuity and change, proximity and distance are similarly important in many other migrant communities, as increasingly restrictive immigration regimes and the fluctuating global economy shape who is able to move and where they may settle