Politicians, Celebrities and Social Media : A case of informalization?

With electoral politics no longer organised by social class, politicians increasingly seek to relate to a broad spectrum of citizens and part of their relatability is conjured through more casual, informal performances aimed at cultivating authenticity. The various platforms of social media promote forms of authentic communication by blurring the public/private divide, creating ‘spontaneous’ and instant access to ‘real life’. This article seeks to investigate the informalization thesis (Wouters, 2007) by applying it to data from young people aged 16-21 years in Australia, the UK and the USA asked about the way politicians and celebrities use social media. Findings reveal respondents’ desire for more authentic and accessible politicians, but this was in direct tension with traditional views and expectations of politicians needing to be professional, informed and worthy of respect. Informalization amongst politicians is evident and welcomed by young citizens but persistent traditional views means it also threatens their credibility

Political geographies of the object

This paper examines the role of objects in the constitution and exercise of state power, drawing on a close reading of the acclaimed HBO television series The Wire, an unconventional crime drama set and shot in Baltimore, Maryland. While political geography increasingly recognizes the prosaic and intimate practices of stateness, we argue that objects themselves are central to the production, organization, and performance of state power. Specifically, we analyze how three prominent objects on The Wire—wiretaps, cameras, and standardized tests—arrange and produce the conditions we understand as ‘stateness’. Drawing on object-oriented philosophy, we offer a methodology of power that suggests it is generalized force relations rather than specifically social relations that police a population—without, of course, ever being able to fully capture it. We conclude by suggesting The Wire itself is an object of force, and explore the implications of an object-oriented approach for understanding the nature of power, and for political geography more broadly

Following the Money: The Wire and Distant American Studies

In this essay, I argue that the pedagogical, or, more generally, heuristic potential of HBO’s crime drama The Wire (2002/2008) is related to the specific institutional developments in post-network television, the show’s didactic intention, and its focus on the delineation of the economic process, or what has been called its “openly class-based” politics. I will dedicate most time to the latter, as it represents a particularly welcome intervention for American Studies, a discipline in which the problem of class has usually been either marginalized, or articulated in terms of the historically hegemonic disciplinary paradigm, that of identity

Mass incarceration and neoliberal penality : a response to Lloyd and Whitehead’s Kicked to the Curb

This paper is written in response to Lloyd and Whitehead’s (2018) Kicked to the Curb: The triangular trade of neoliberal polity, social insecurity, and penal expul-sion. Using the “triangular trade” that underpinned chattel slavery as an analytical metaphor, Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) argue that the growth of mass incarcera-tion is an endogenous feature of neoliberalism. They conclude a distinctive form of penality - neoliberal penality has developed over the past forty years. Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) propose that a tripartite model - neoliberalism, precarity and mass incarceration - as the basis for a model of neoliberal penality. This paper uses an exploration of the arguments raised by Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) to examine the links between neoliberalism and the expansion of the penal state. Whilst rec-ognising the centrality of race to these issues, the paper argues that the model that Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) present offers a partial explanation for mass incarcer-ation. This paper acknowledges that the triangular trade metaphor is a powerful one but will conclude that it has limitations. In particular, the comparison be-tween mass incarceration and chattel slavery is overstated. The economic impact of slavery and its centrality to the modern capitalism (Williams, 2014) cannot be compared to the exploitation that occurs in the current prison system. The paper argues that neoliberalism, precarity and mass incarceration are clearly linked but do not constitute a triangular trade as Lloyd and Whitehead (2018) conclude

Celebrated criminality : the relationship between celebrity and crime in Britain and the US

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

‘It was the easiest way to kind of announce it’: Exploring death announcements on social media through a dramaturgical lens

The internet and social media have radically transformed grief, mourning and memorialisation. This article addresses how online death announcements (ODAs) (where bereaved people use social media platforms to share news of a loved one’s death) are extending beyond the role of public death notification previously limited to newspaper-published obituaries. We argue that ODAs are social performances embodying a diverse range of grief responses and offer a significant new direction in death scholarship. We draw on semi-structured interview data with nine people who announced the death of a loved one on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Using Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework to interrogate this data, we argue that ODAs go beyond purely information-sharing devices and are, instead, complex performances which benefit mourners in a number of ways and are governed by tacit ‘rules’ of permission and content. To make sense of this, we analyse in turn the role of, and collaboration between, the ‘actors’ who post ODAs, the ‘performance’ of the ODA itself, and the ‘audience’ of friends/followers who ‘receive’ the ODA. We reveal that ODAs are social performances possessing multiple modalities and reveal the depth of complexity present in grieving online

Photography and Death: Framing Death throughout History

Examining a spectrum of post-mortem images, this volume considers what death photography communicates about attitudes related to dying, mourning and the afterlife

Politicians, celebrities and social media: a case of informalisation?

With electoral politics no longer organised by social class, politicians increasingly seek to relate to a broad spectrum of citizens and part of their relatability is conjured through more casual, informal performances aimed at cultivating authenticity. The various platforms of social media promote forms of authentic communication by blurring the public/private divide, creating ‘spontaneous’ and instant access to ‘real life’. This article seeks to investigate the informalisation thesis by applying it to data from young people aged 16–21 years in Australia, the UK and the USA, asked about the way politicians and celebrities use social media. Findings reveal respondents’ desire for more authentic and accessible politicians, but this was in direct tension with traditional views and expectations of politicians needing to be professional, informed and worthy of respect. Informalisation amongst politicians is evident and welcomed by young citizens but persistent traditional views means it also threatens their credibility.Nathan Manning, Ruth Penfold-Mounce, Brian D. Loader, Ariadne Vromen and Michael Xeno