Cultural Consumption Through the Epistemologies of the South: 'Humanization' in Transnational Football Fan Solidarities

In 2014, Boaventura de Sousa Santos awoke the global sociological community to the need to privilege ‘humanization’ in the exploration of transnational solidarities. This article presents the cultural consumption of a football club – Liverpool FC – to understand the common ‘love’, ‘suffering’, ‘care’ and ‘knowledge’ that fans who are part of the ‘Brazil Reds’ or ‘Switzerland Reds’ (although not all fans engaged in such communities are ‘from’ Brazil or Switzerland) experience. The argument is that the global North lexicon of social class, ethnicity, gender and, especially, nationality is less significant as starting points for analysis than humanization through shared love, which consolidates Liverpool FC fans’ transnational solidarities. Accordingly, the article calls for the epistemologies of the global South to be used to understand the practices of cultural consumption that constitute activities in the sphere of everyday life, such as those involved in ‘love’ for a football club

Representation of cognitive reappraisal goals in frontal gamma oscillations

Recently, numerous efforts have been made to understand the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive regulation of emotion, such as cognitive reappraisal. Many studies have reported that cognitive control of emotion induces increases in neural activity of the control system, including the prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and increases or decreases (depending upon the regulation goal) in neural activity of the appraisal system, including the amygdala and the insula. It has been hypothesized that information about regulation goals needs to be processed through interactions between the control and appraisal systems in order to support cognitive reappraisal. However, how this information is represented in the dynamics of cortical activity remains largely unknown. To address this, we investigated temporal changes in gamma band activity (35-55 Hz) in human electroencephalograms during a cognitive reappraisal task that was comprised of three reappraisal goals: To decease, maintain, or increase emotional responses modulated by affect-laden pictures. We examined how the characteristics of gamma oscillations, such as spectral power and large-scale phase synchronization, represented cognitive reappraisal goals. We found that left frontal gamma power decreased, was sustained, or increased when the participants suppressed, maintained, or amplified their emotions, respectively. This change in left frontal gamma power appeared during an interval of 1926 to 2453 ms after stimulus onset. We also found that the number of phase-synchronized pairs of gamma oscillations over the entire brain increased when participants regulated their emotions compared to when they maintained their emotions. These results suggest that left frontal gamma power may reflect cortical representation of emotional states modulated by cognitive reappraisal goals and gamma phase synchronization across whole brain regions may reflect emotional regulatory efforts to achieve these goals. Our study may provide the basis for an electroencephalogram-based neurofeedback system for the cognitive regulation of emotion.open0

Reflexivity or orientation? Collective memories in the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand national press

With regard to the notion of ‘national reflexivity’, an important part of Beck’s cosmopolitan outlook, this article examines how, and, in what ways, collective memories of empire were reflexively used in Australian, Canadian and New Zealand national newspaper coverage of the 2012 Diamond Jubilee and London Olympic Games. In contrast to Beck, it is argued that examples of national reflexivity were closely tied to the history of the nation-state, with collective memories of the former British Empire used to debate, critique and appraise ‘the nation’. These memories were discursively used to ‘orientate’ each nation’s postcolonial emergence, suggesting that examples of national reflexivity, within the press’ coverage, remained closely tied to the ‘historical fetishes’ enveloped in each nations’ imperial past(s). This implies that the ‘national outlook’ does not objectively overlook, uncritically absorb or reflexively acknowledge differences with ‘the other’, but instead, negotiates a historically grounded and selective appraisal of the past that reveals a contingent and, at times, ambivalent, interplay with ‘the global’

Time and temporality in online corporate pictorials

Many different social contexts are embedded in, and mediated by, visual practices, so too in corporate communication. The specific aim of this paper is to use the concept of scopic regimes as a means of understanding pictorial representations of time and temporality in online corporate communication. It is argued in this paper that the temporal reference has changed direction, from pointing backward to forward. What has been a matter of predominantly portraying important corporate achievements to posterity has increasingly become a matter of appearing for impatient online viewers today as responsible for the future. Three illustrative examples of time and temporality in online corporate pictorials are included and discussed, representing movement, moment, and the allegory of time

Olfaction and the retail environment: examining the influence of ambient scent

Smell, Scent, Retail brand image, Retail environment, Human olfaction,