Individualism, exceptionalism and counter culture in Second World War special service training

This paper explores the origins and nature of early special service training in the Scottish highlands and its influence on the culture of special service organisations during the Second World War and after. Focussing on the improvised training system devised at Inverailort House, Inverness-shire in the summer of 1940, it traces how ideas about special training developed in challenge to conventional British military organisation and thinking. The theory of organisational culture, including the role of artefacts in defining subcultures and countercultures, is used to analyse the place of training and selection in the evolving and uneasy relationship between special service and traditional British military culture

Journalism and the Culture of Othering

In seeking to render problematic traditional conceptions of journalistic identity, this article critiques the seemingly natural, even ‘common sensical’ structures of social exclusion recurrently underpinning its formulation. More specifically, it explores, firstly, a series of insights provided by feminist and gender-sensitive critiques of journalism. In assessing the typically subtle imperatives of sexism in news reporting, it considers the extent to which journalistic identity continues to be defined within the day-to-day ‘macho culture’ of the newsroom, where female journalists’ perceptions of sexual discrimination typically vary sharply from those held by their male colleagues. Secondly, attention turns to the issue of ethnic diversity, where the need to deconstruct the racialised projection of ‘us and them’ dichotomies precisely as they are taken-up and re-inflected in news reporting is shown to be of pressing concern. In bringing together these respective set of debates, primarily from British and US contexts, this article aims to contribute to conceptual efforts to further unravel the ways in which journalists’ routine, everyday choices about what to report – how best to do it, and why –involves them in a politics of mediation, one where all too often a culture of othering proves significant

Everyday imagery: Users' reflections on smartphone cameras and communication

User-based research into the lived experiences associated with smartphone camera practices – in particular, the taking, storing, curating and sharing of personal imagery in the digital media sphere – remains scarce, especially in contrast to its increasing ubiquity. Accordingly, this article’s detailed analysis of open-ended questionnaires from ‘millennial’ smartphone users elucidates the varied experiential, compositional and technological aspects associated with smartphone imagery in everyday life. It argues that the associated changes do more than just update previous technologies but rather open space up for emergent forms of visual communication. Specifically, our close interpretive reading indicates four key factors underlying the moments privileged when using smartphone cameras, namely: they deviate from the mundane, are related to ‘positive’ emotions, evince strong social bonds and encompass a future-oriented perspective. Relatedly, in terms of photographic composition, visual content tends to circulate around: the social presence of others, boundedness of event, perceived aesthetic value and intended shareability. Our findings question certain formulations about the gradual disappearance of media from personal consciousness in a digital age. If ceaselessness is a defining characteristic of the current era, our analysis reveals that the use of smartphone cameras is indicative of people affectively and self-consciously deploying the technology to try to arrest the ephemerality of daily life, however fleetingly. This article thus pinpoints the theoretical and methodological value of research approaches moving beyond a narrow focus on the usage patterns to uncover the spatio-temporal specificities shaping (and being shaped by) smartphone imagery and its communicative resonances

Visual truths of citizen reportage:Four research problematics

In striving to better understand issues associated with citizen contributions to newsmaking in crisis situations, this article identifies and elaborates four specific research problematics – bearing witness, technologies of truth-telling, mediating visualities and affectivities of othering – in order to recast more familiar modes of enquiry. Specifically, it provides an alternative heuristic to theorize the journalistic mediation of citizen imagery, and the myriad ways this process of negotiation maintains, repairs and at times disrupts the interstices of professional–amateur boundaries. Rather than centring analysis on how crisis events highlight change, it discerns the basis for a critical tracing of the material configurations and contingencies shaping journalistic imperatives towards generating visually truthful reportage. In seeking to move debates about how best to enliven digital journalism's future beyond the polarities of new media advocacy and criticism alike, we emphasize the importance of developing a collaborative, co-operative ethos of connectivity between journalists as citizens and citizens as journalists. Accordingly, each proposed problematic is examined in a manner alert to pinpointing its prospective value for theory-building, and in so doing elucidating its potential utility for scholarship in the years ahead