The European Lurch to the Right

The most recent signs of a widened swing to the Right in Europe require us to look further afield, to countries like the USA, Russia, Argentina and India. In this perspective, the most troubling trend is that the failure of neo-liberal policies around the world appears to feed support for the Right, and not for the Left

The Academic Digital Divide and Uneven Global Development

CARGC Paper 4 reprinted Appadurai’s October 2015 Distinguished Lecture at PARGC. In it, he warned against the dangers of “knowledge-based imperialism and scholarly apartheid” and offered possible ways to avoid them. Appadurai identified a growing rift between media studies and communication studies, with scholars concerned with institutions, power, resources, and large-scale data on one side, and scholars concerned with interpretation, texts, languages, and images on the other. Yet, despite the history of this divide, in CARGC Paper 4, Appadurai outlined what we can do to close the growing distance between media and communication studies.https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_papers/1003/thumbnail.jp

The Ready-Made Pleasures of Déjà Vu

This essay argues that the phenomenon of repeat viewing of films by Bollywood audiences is worthy of being treated as an unusual cultural practice in which repetition and difference support and reinforce each other in the manner suggested by Gilles Deleuze. This relationship is particularly enabled by the relationship of music to plot in these films, in which song sequences provide a repetitive or percussive element that deepens the melodic and innovative element provided by the story. Not all films are able to attract repeat viewers, which raises a question about the role of the “formula” in the Hindi film industry. Further, the pleasures of repetition in this domain offer a suggestive perspective on India’s larger political dilemma, which is to combine the repetition of Western modernity with the unique developmental signature of Indian culture.Peer Reviewe

Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket

For the former colony, decolonization is a dialogue with the colonial past, and not asimple dismantling of colonial habits and modes of life. Nowhere are the complexitiesand ambiguities of this dialogue more evident than in the vicissitudes of cricket inthose countries that were once part of the British Empire. In the Indian case, thecultural aspects of decolonization deeply affect every domain of public life, fromlanguage and the arts to ideas about political representation and economic justice. lnevery major public debate in contemporary India, one underlying strand is always thequestion of what to do with the shreds and patches of the Colonial heritage. Some ofthese patches are institutional; others are ideological and aesthetic

The problem of globalization

There is a general consensus that the contemporary world is best under-stood through the prism of globalization. This view is shared by most social scientists, politicians, journalists, businesses, and indeed broad sectors of the general population. Opinions differ as to whether global-ization is a positive or a negative development, but there is general agreement that whatever is going on is either a symptom or a consequence of globalization. There are many good reasons for this view. The number of passengers on scheduled international flights has risen by a factor of six between 1975 and 2000. The number of international tourist arrivals rose by three and a half times during the same period. Much less happily, the number of internationally displaced refugees rose by around 50 percent in the 20 years before 2000. During the quarter of a century after 1975, the duration of international voice telephone calls rose by around 25 times. We could go on multiplying such striking figures i

On Children (Editorial)

So, what does it mean to compose a journal issue that attempts to look at our relationships with children under the problematic title ‘On Children’? The writing between these pages undoubtedly carries with it an attendant anxiety about objectifying, naming and otherwise categorizing children. Yet, at the same time, the focus of the title ‘on’ children deliberately sets out to occupy agap in theatre and performance scholarship that Nicholas Ridout called to our attention over a decade ago: ‘the question of children as theatrical performers is atopic in its own right, and awaits further study’ (2006:98‑9). Extending Ridout’s invitation to take seriously the appearance of children in a theatrical setting, ‘On Children’ hopes to foreground this problem of writing about children without reducing them to research objects. It does this by exploring the multiple roles that children occupy in relation to performance: children as collaborators, researchers, philosophers, activists, artists and political agents. In naming children as such, the contributions presented here cannot escape the violence of categorization. However, the process of creating this issue puts into practice the tension at the heart of performance research ‘on’ children, pushing back at the very boundaries of academic practice by actively including children as co‑editors, contributors, designers and ‘peer’ reviewer

‘We are labeled as gang members, even though we are not’: belonging, aspirations and social mobility in Cartagena

This paper explores how belonging and aspirations interact to shape marginalized young Colombians’ strategies for upward social mobility. Recent literature has argued that in the context of inequality and poverty, social mobility is constrained by people’s inability to aspire to and/or achieve their aspirations. The majority of this literature is from the economics field and looks at the way poverty acts as a brake on social mobility. This paper provides an additional interdisciplinary analysis of the role of ‘belonging’ (to places and social class) in influencing aspirations of young Colombians. Findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork with young people from two marginalized neighborhoods in Cartagena. It is argued that aspirations are closely linked to belonging and the extent to which young people feel integral to or distanced from their localities. Using a Bourdieusian perspective, the paper examines how belonging is developed and how it influences behavior, orientations and future prospects. This approach generates insights into young people’s apparent low aspirations beyond the explanation of internal behavioral poverty traps. In so doing, it provides a more comprehensive understanding of how societal structures limit aspiration development and achievement