Food, Comfort and Community: Media Coverage of Last Meals for the Dying

This article examines the media coverage of food in the context of community-based end of life rituals and death meals that are increasingly being observed by those undergoing a medically assisted death (medical assistance in dying: MAID). I employ a reconstituted form of media analysis that aims to identify and unpack the socio-cultural themes, values, and assumptions that underpin these food events. These include the central frame of plenty, community/family, personality, comfort, and gender. My objective is to provoke a discussion about how media coverage acts as a site from which to understand the significance of food in the context of death, when death is desired, and how new avenues of research can be pursed therein

Identifying the barriers to inclusion in field-based environmental sciences research

Fieldwork is an important component of data collection in environmental sciences and other related disciplines. Sensitive to the ways in which field based environmental sciences (FBES) research is often unsafe and lacks inclusivity, we explore findings from a mixed methods study that identified barriers to inclusion and overlooked risks to safety for FBES researchers. We found that gender and gender identity presented a direct risk for discrimination, harassment, and violence in the field (63.8% of cis females and 100% of nonbinary/genderqueer respondents). Sexuality, race, and ethnicity also posed a risk to FBES researchers with 88.3% of respondents stating that marginalised groups are underrepresented in FBES. Over half of our respondents stated class and socio-economic background to be a barrier to their participation in FBES research due to job precarity and lack of funding. These risks and barriers experienced by researchers can lead to a lack of novelty in environmental science. As such, we argue that we need to increase diversity whilst reducing risks in FBES and cultivate a more prosperous, safe, and empowered research culture

The Neoliberalization of Sleep: A Discursive and Materialist Analysis of Sleep Technologies

This article explores the implications of sleep apps which are sociologically significant in that they represent an attempt to colonize, exploit, and make profitable one of the last vestiges of the human lifeworld through discourses of self-subjectification, authenticity, and self-improvement. I assess the websites of two sleep tracking apps (Pillow and Sleep Score) using critical discourse analysis (CDA), new materialism, and autoethnography. I make the case that the neoliberal values associated with the use of these apps perpetuate the logic that a better sleep makes for a more productive worker, better citizen, and ideal consumer subject. I also demonstrate how these apps function to open new sites of potential profit and reproduce a form of embodied neoliberal subjectivity generated by intra-active entanglements between identities, technologies, and discourses. Finally, I take up the issue of marginalization and intersecting subject positions as it relates to inequalities that these sleep trackers might exacerbate.This article explores the implications of sleep apps which are sociologically significant in that they represent an attempt to colonize, exploit, and make profitable one of the last vestiges of the human lifeworld through discourses of self-subjectification, authenticity, and self-improvement. I assess the websites of two sleep tracking apps (Pillow and Sleep Score) using critical discourse analysis (CDA), new materialism, and autoethnography. I make the case that the neoliberal values associated with the use of these apps perpetuate the logic that a better sleep makes for a more productive worker, better citizen, and ideal consumer subject. I also demonstrate how these apps function to open new sites of potential profit and reproduce a form of embodied neoliberal subjectivity generated by intra-active entanglements between identities, technologies, and discourses. Finally, I take up the issue of marginalization and intersecting subject positions as it relates to inequalities that these sleep trackers might exacerbate.This article explores the implications of sleep apps which are sociologically significant in that they represent an attempt to colonize, exploit, and make profitable one of the last vestiges of the human lifeworld through discourses of self-subjectification, authenticity, and self-improvement. I assess the websites of two sleep tracking apps (Pillow and Sleep Score) using critical discourse analysis (CDA), new materialism, and autoethnography. I make the case that the neoliberal values associated with the use of these apps perpetuate the logic that a better sleep makes for a more productive worker, better citizen, and ideal consumer subject. I also demonstrate how these apps function to open new sites of potential profit and reproduce a form of embodied neoliberal subjectivity generated by intra-active entanglements between identities, technologies, and discourses. Finally, I take up the issue of marginalization and intersecting subject positions as it relates to inequalities that these sleep trackers might exacerbate

Technology, Gender, and Climate Change: A Feminist Examination of Climate Technologies

In this article, I examine the subject of justice as it relates to gender and climate change by focusing on two specific strategies, namely, the geoengineering strategy of ocean fertilization, and renewable energy as a means of mitigation (where mitigation is understood as the adoption of technologies and practices that aim to slow the rise of greenhouse gas emissions). My overarching argument is that iron fertilization geoengineering is not consistent with the feminist values of justice embedded in feminist standpoint theory and feminist contextual empiricism. Alternative mitigation strategies, on the other hand, go much further in meeting these objectives and virtues

Indigenous knowledge and new materialism

This chapter draws on the British Columbia Thomas and Saik’uz First Nation v Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) Inc case and new materialism to challenge the extractivist thinking, settler colonial logic, and neoliberal hegemony that we argue characterise contemporary debates around climate change and environmental justice. After providing background to the case as well as to new materialism, we draw on legal, governmental, media, and local texts to perform two ‘cuts’ (Liberal-State-Corporate and Indigenous-Nature) which we use to examine the themes of rights, ownership, legal permissibility, global capitalism, and sustainability. We then use this to articulate a robust case for further research and support for Indigenous cosmologies which, from our perspective, are infinitely more capable of offering a way forward - one that challenges environmental violence and centres non-human nature.</p

The Propaganda Model and Intersectionality: Integrating Separate Paradigms

International audienceThe world is currently witnessing a revitalisation of the right and of authoritarian political tendencies. Right-wing forces across the globe have been able to push misogynist, homophobic and xenophobic discourses into the mainstream of politics and media. Whilst these developments have been fuelled by the neoliberal economic programmes unrolled since the 1970s, sexism and racism have always been anchored within the structures of real existing capitalism. This suggests, then, that many of the societal issues we are encountering today are rooted in structural disadvantage and oppression pertaining not only to economics and class but also to gender, race and ethnicity. Yet, approaches in Communication Studies and Cultural Studies have often engaged in separate interrogations of media misrepresentations in relation to either class and economics, or gender and/or race. On the other hand, intersectional scholarship has long highlighted how these societal spheres are interconnected and should thus be researched simultaneously. The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model constitutes the leading analytical tool to theorize and investigate media bias. The following contributions will conceptualize and illustrate how the PM relates to intersectional scholarship and societal structures. This will be done on the basis of theoretical elaborations and empirical case studies as well as broader discussions of the politics within the disciplines of Communications Studies and Cultural Studies. It will be demonstrated that the PM can be used to unveil interlocking media biases and misrepresentations deriving from parallel societal discriminations including classism, sexism and racism