Reading Graphic Novels in School: texts, contexts and the interpretive work of critical reading

This paper uses the example of an extra-curricular Graphic Novel Reading Group in order to explore the institutional critical reading practices that take place in English classrooms in the senior years of secondary school. Drawing on Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities, it questions the restrictive interpretive strategies applied to literary texts in curriculum English. By looking closely at the interpretive strategies pupils apply to a different kind of text (graphic novels) in an alternative context (an extra-curricular space) the paper suggests that there may be other ways of engaging with text that pupils find less alienating, more pleasurable and less reminiscent of 'work'

The global politics of a ‘poncy pillowcase’: Migration and borders in Coronation Street

This article examines the ways in which popular culture stages and supplies resources for agency in everyday life, with particular attention to migration and borders. Drawing upon cultural studies, and specific insights originating from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we explore how intersectional identities such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender are experienced in relation to the globalisation of culture and identity in a 2007 Coronation Street storyline. The soap opera genre offers particular insights into how agency emerges in everyday life as migrants and locals navigate the forces of globalisation. We argue that a focus on popular culture can mitigate the problem of isolating migrant experiences from local experiences in migrant-receiving areas

Determinants of impact : towards a better understanding of encounters with the arts

The article argues that current methods for assessing the impact of the arts are largely based on a fragmented and incomplete understanding of the cognitive, psychological and socio-cultural dynamics that govern the aesthetic experience. It postulates that a better grasp of the interaction between the individual and the work of art is the necessary foundation for a genuine understanding of how the arts can affect people. Through a critique of philosophical and empirical attempts to capture the main features of the aesthetic encounter, the article draws attention to the gaps in our current understanding of the responses to art. It proposes a classification and exploration of the factors—social, cultural and psychological—that contribute to shaping the aesthetic experience, thus determining the possibility of impact. The ‘determinants of impact’ identified are distinguished into three groups: those that are inherent to the individual who interacts with the artwork; those that are inherent to the artwork; and ‘environmental factors’, which are extrinsic to both the individual and the artwork. The article concludes that any meaningful attempt to assess the impact of the arts would need to take these ‘determinants of impact’ into account, in order to capture the multidimensional and subjective nature of the aesthetic experience

Reader and author gender and genre in Goodreads

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Librarianship & Information Science on 01/05/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0961000617709061 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online

(Un)twisted: talking back to media representations of eating disorders

In 2014-15, there were several news reports about a rise in the diagnoses and treatment of eating disorders (EDs), as attributed to the use of image-driven social media. Such coverage can be situated within a long history of concern in which those diagnosed with an ED are constructed as ‘especially vulnerable’ to the power of media images – a subjectivity which is pathologised and devalued precisely through its association with femininity. The most incisive objections to EDs being presented as a response to the ‘weight’ of media representation have come from Abigail Bray (2005) in her work on how anorexia is constructed as a reading as well as an eating disorder. Indeed, there is a whole history of empirical work in Feminist Media Studies and Girlhood Studies which has challenged the pernicious construction of female subjectivity as ‘excessively’ invested in, and ‘damaged’ by, the consumption of mass mediated forms. Yet the media consumption practices of those with experience of an ED have not been subject to similar feminist re-evaluation – an omission which this research seeks to address. In exploring the results of 17 semi-structured interviews with people who have experience of an ED discussing their encounters with media representations of EDs (material that is often co-opted into debates about the ‘toxic’ nature of media culture in this regard), this article seeks to intervene in how such imagined media consumption practices are often defined. In seeking to speak back to historically pathologising constructions, the article seeks to explore the qualitative responses in the context of more ‘every day’ understandings of media engagement, thus working against the gendered othering which has persistently occurred

History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory, 1945-2001

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91765/1/Schuman-History_Commemoration_Belief.pd