Making connections in the Global South

Dr Don Slater’s new book asks how can we democratise the ways we think and practice new media, development and globalisation

Designing nocturnal cities: Illuminating the social role light plays in urban life.

Sociologists Joanne Entwistle, Don Slater, and Mona Sloane look at the fundamental role of light in social life. Lighting has a lot to say about social structures, yet many of these assumptions remain unchallenged. By investigating lighting design, social scientists can understand how social relationships are linked to technology and the wider built environment. In conjunction with the research, the team have recently released two videos which further explore the aims and outcomes of their recent Urban Lightscapes/Social Nightscapes project

Strategic ambiguity:A roundtable on cultural economy and consumer culture

This lightly edited transcript records the discussion at the opening roundtable of the What Was Cultural Economy? symposium at City, University of London in January 2020. In it, Don Slater, Sean Nixon and Liz McFall, all participants in the original ‘Workshop on Cultural Economy' reflect on the conceptual and institutional history of ‘cultural economy’ and how it intersected with their shared interests in advertising and consumer culture. Their individual reflections are followed by a shared discussion, with contributions from the floor. The transcript has been edited for clarity

Taking Snapshots, Living the Picture: The Kodak Company's Making of Photographic Biography

In this article I explore how George Eastman and the Eastman Kodak Company encouraged early twentieth-century camera users to think of snapshots as pictorial biographies. Analysing a wide selection of articles from the Kodakery, one of Kodak’s most popular magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, I demonstrate that the company endeavoured to secure its prominence in the photographic market by encouraging members of the public to integrate picture-taking into everyday life, and regard photographs as self-contained repositories of biographical details. To this end, Kodak framed the speedy pace of life that characterised the practice of being in the industrial world as a reality that allegedly weakened the human eye and mind’s ability to process the experience of life itself. Introducing the idea of the camera and picturetaking as the ultimate cures for this purported human deficiency, Kodak provided camera users with advice that helped to cement an understanding of photographs as surrogates of both the changing human body and individual subjects’ experiences in time and space. As in popular culture, and sometimes also in academia, photographs are still widely regarded as pictorial biographies, I argue that considering the popular photographic industry’s role in shaping photographic practices and photographs’ perceived meanings can help clarify the relationship between photography and life-writing

Adding confidence to knowledge

This paper reviews knowledge surveys as a best practice in assessment and illustrates how this assessment tool was used to compare teaching methods and its value to students during a 5-year study. The goal was to improve assessment, active learning, and course design. On each survey, students rated a type of confidence known as self-efficacy before and after instruction, used the survey as a study guide during instruction, and rated its value at the end of the course. Results showed gains in self-efficacy (p<.001), high value for the survey experience, and differences in scores across teaching methods (p<.001)

Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the 'Family Snapshot'?

This paper considers how parents use the social media platform Instagram to facilitate the capture, curation and sharing of ‘family snapshots’. Our work draws upon established cross-disciplinary literature relating to film photography and the composition of family albums in order to establish whether social media has changed the way parents visually present their families. We conducted a qualitative visual analysis of a sample of 4,000 photographs collected from Instagram using hashtags relating to children and parenting. We show that the style and composition of snapshots featuring children remains fundamentally unchanged and continues to be dominated by rather bland and idealised images of the happy family and the cute child. In addition, we find that the frequent taking and sharing of photographs via Instagram has inevitably resulted in a more mundane visual catalogue of daily life. We note a tension in the desire to use social media as a means to evidence good parenting, while trying to effectively manage the social identity of the child and finally, we note the reluctance of parents to use their own snapshots to portray family tension or disharmony, but their willingness to use externally generated content for this purpose

Intertrial auditory neural stability supports beat synchronization in preschoolers

The ability to synchronize motor movements along with an auditory beat places stringent demands on the temporal processing and sensorimotor integration capabilities of the nervous system. Links between millisecond-level precision of auditory encoding and the consistency of sensorimotor beat synchronization implicate fine auditory neural timing as a potential mechanism for forming stable internal representations of, and behavioral reactions to, sound events. Here, for the first time, we demonstrate a systematic relationship between consistency of beat synchronization and consistency of subcortical neural speech processing in preschoolers (ages 3 and 4 years old). We conclude that beat synchronization might be a useful behavioral window into millisecond-level subcortical neural precision for encoding sound in early childhood; at an age that speech processing is especially important for language acquisition and development