"Asterix Repelling the Invader": Globalization and Nationalism in News Coverage of Jose Bove and the McDonald's Incident

This article examines Associated Press and Agence France-Presse wire service coverage of Frenchman Jose Bove's 1999 ransacking of a Millau, France, McDonald's, as well as his subsequent trial. News media coverage of this incident represents an opportunity to examine deeper issues surrounding globalization, nationalism, and the media's-in this case, international news agencies'-role in constructing and maintaining both. Analysis suggests that both services covered the Bove incidents similarly, downplaying the broader context of corporate capitalism and the global movement to resist it, while elevating Bove to be a key representative of the movement. At the same time that they anointed Bove as a French icon (contributing to "Bovemania"), the wire services constructed a comical caricature of him, which ultimately discredits the activists and the movement he represents.     

Editorial

This article reports on a narrative inquiry with two teacher-researchers of opposite ethnic, social class, and gender backgrounds about how their oppositions became an asset for their multicultural education. The study calls for educators to consider cultural creativity as a pertinent feature of multicultural education in today's polarized culture.     

The Games We Play Online and Offline: Making Wang-tta in Korea

This article presents an ethnographic analysis of case studies derived from fieldwork that was designed to consider the different ways Korean game players establish community online and offline. I consider ways Korean youth participate in activities at Korean computer game rooms, which can be thought of as "third places." A synthesis of the Korean concept Wang-tta provides extra insight into the motivations to excel at digital games and one of the strong drivers of such community membership. Korea's gaming society has many unique elements within the interplay of culture, social structure, and infrastructure.     

Language choice and global learning networks: The pitfall of “lingua franca” approaches to classroom telecomputing 1

This article examines students' narrative responses to reading professional literacy histories. Demonstrating the importance of narrative as a way of learning, it shows how elementary education majors of diverse backgrounds explore their relation with language in a traditional grammar class. Cajun, Creole, and African American students recover their literacy histories and articulate the relation between the loss of language and the loss of culture and heritage. Drawing on the parallels between their discourse histories and the discourse histories of other cultures, these narratives also suggest that the students are now able to establish their linguistic identity and develop a greater sensitivity to the situations of their own students in the multicultural classrooms of southwest Louisiana.     

Fielding the Study of Reception: Notes on "Negotiation" for Global Media Studies

As an emerging area of inquiry, "global media reception studies" has quietly amassed into a minor industry of scholarship. Of this body of work, ethnographic studies stand out in terms of their rigor and depth and their potential to engage theoretically our understanding of audiences' negotiation of meaning-a construct rooted in Hall's (1996) encoding/decoding model-which is important because the negotiation of meaning occupied a central place in the reception literature of the 1980s and 1990s, where it was articulated in terms of agency, intentionality, and subject-formation. Through this emphasis, however, the authority of media discourses often moved out of focus whereas media consumers' tactics, resistance, and pleasure emerged as primary points of analysis. In a call to rethink the notion of negotiation ethnographically, this article offers a critical assessment of the gaps and links between past reception studies and current media ethnographies and suggests ways that fieldwork could lead to a deeper and more complex understanding of audience meaning making.     

Prostration Before the Law: Representations of Illness,Interaction, and Intimacy in the NYPD Blue Prostate Cancer Narrative

Building on extant literature on media, illness narratives, and "message television," we analyze the prostate cancer narrative presented in ABC's police drama, NYPD Blue. Given the potential for entertainment television as a source of health information, we justify the need to examine the prostate cancer experiences portrayed by the show's central character, Detective Andy Sipowicz, and his wife Sylvia. In addition to using narrative analysis, we compare the televised story with knowledge derived from extant research on prostate cancer and prostate cancer support groups. After providing background information about the television series and the disease, we investigate the accuracy and scope of the prostate cancer information presented in the story. In doing so, we consider (a) depictions of the wife as a selfless support source, (b) dialectical tensions that emerge within the marital relationship because of the illness experience, and (c) the narrative probability of this fictitious illness narrative.     

Daejanggeum as ‘affective mobilization’: lessons for (transnational) popular culture and civil society

Abstract

(Transnationalized) popular culture and (global) social movement are often seen as unrelated, if not mutually exclusive. Popular culture is entertaining, consensual but trivial; social movement is serious, idealized and oppositional. Yet the WTO Ministerial Conference, held in Hong Kong in December 2005, saw the Korean protesters' adoption of the theme‐song of a popular Korean television drama, Daejanggeum, as their protest strategy. The Korean protesters had been framed by mainstream Hong Kong media as ‘violent rioters’, but the inclusion of the drama elements helped the protesters advance their cause by gaining instant rapport with the local Hong Kong news media and public/fans (of Korean wave). The impact of celebrity involvement in the WTO was also about an immediate transferal of fan affect, from celebrities to the movement, and to the Korean protesters. This ‘affect mobilization’, becomes important as movement capital, as the effective manipulation of emotions is a key to ‘getting the message across’ as movement strategies. The case of WTO Hong Kong reveals the possibility of a symbiotic relationship between transnational popular culture and globalized social movements. The ‘use’ of (Korean) popular cultural products enriches and complicates the affect subjectivities within the social movement, and arranges fan affect into multiple layers of emotion hierarchies/spheres. It remains to be seen, however, if this would set a precedence to protesters in future WTO rounds as they are keen to mobilize their causes in different locales. More research is needed, too, to demonstrate if the success of the Korean wave fosters the emergence of a transnational Asian ‘public’ or civil society. Yet, for now, the success of Korean protesters in the mobilization of Hong Kong public's affect epitomizes the hegemonic flow, or soft power, of Korean TV dramas in the Asian popular.     

The “scouse wedding” and other myths: reflections on the evolution of a “Liverpool model” for culture-led urban regeneration

This paper considers the development of a “Liverpool model” for culture-led urban regeneration, based on an analysis of the competition to become the UK's first City of Culture (UKCC) for 2013. The paper outlines New Labour's developing approach to culture-led regeneration, placing the UKCC in the context of the use of culture for various local development policies, particularly city branding and urban regeneration (Evans & Shaw, 2004; McGuigan, 2005). Within this context, the paper considers how Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2008 has been narrated by New Labour and the manner in which this narrative has influenced the development of the UKCC programme (Department for Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS], 2009; Garcia, Melville & Cox, 2010). The paper demonstrates how this narrative overlooks the ultimate specificity of Liverpool's success (Liverpool Culture Company, 2009; Garcia et al., 2010), which suggests a unique combination of political circumstance, cultural leadership and public and private investment are at the root of the perceived success of Liverpool's ECoC 2008, rather than an exportable, replicable policy (O'Brien & Miles, 2010) described by the policy literature, and substantiated by the competition to select the UKCC 2013 (DCMS, 2009). The paper's conclusion problematises the prospect of another city repeating the Liverpool experience. The “Liverpool model” of culture-led regeneration is shown as one which limits prospective cultural policies to a narrow vision of the possible, a vision which is unlikely to be sustainable in the foreseeable future.     

Building a new society on the base of locality: transformation of social forces in Taiwan during the 1990s

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explain the transformation of social forces in Taiwan during the 1990s, as well as the “ideals of society” embedded in Community Construction that aims to reconstruct the local community. Based upon the analysis of discourses of movement agents, I differentiate four ideal-types of “good society” configured in the Community Construction. First, by the ideal-type of “indigenous (bentu) society,” people hope to reconstruct local history and local culture. Secondly, by “civilized society,” people want to build a society in which its residents live in solidarity and civility. Thirdly, by “civil society” people emphasize the importance of grassroots democracy and the subject position based on locality in order to respond to forces of the state and the market. Lastly, by “civic society” people aims to construct communities encompassing different geographical ranges, in which people from different backgrounds can live together and integrate into a civic nation. Among these ideal-types, “civic society” is the articulating link between “indigenous society” and “civil society,” while locality has become the fundamental element in defining “culture” and “community” in Taiwan. As a result, the cultural resistance based on locality has transformed into the cultural governance focusing on locality.     

State Practice,Nationalist Politics and the Hunger Strikes of the Lahore Conspiracy Case Prisoners, 1929–39

ABSTRACT

This article examines the hunger strikes of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, a small group of revolutionary prisoners in India's jails in the midst of the nationalist movement. It examines the everyday practices of the state and demonstrates that the legal powers and medical duties designed to guide prison administrators in fact provided room for individual officers to improvise non-standard means of causing prisoners physical distress in order to end the strike. In these daily encounters, the prisoners adapted novel forms of resistance to meet each new technique. The second purpose of this article is to explore the reasons why their hunger strikes brought these men to the forefront of India's nationalist movement. It is argued, that although many members of the Indian National Congress were ambivalent about these revolutionaries, Congressmen nonetheless used the patriotic sacrifices of these prisoners to mobilize ordinary Indians for the nationalist cause.     

“Lift Up a Living Nation”: Community and Nation,Socialism and Religion in The English Hymnal, 1906

The lead editors of The English Hymnal (1906), Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams, found Victorian hymnody in need of serious revision, and not just aesthetically. This musical book was intended as an expression of the editors' Christian socialist politics involving in the participation of the congregation. This article examines how they achieved this by the encouragement of active citizenship through communal music-making, using folksong tunes alongside texts which affirmed community. This article argues that the editors wedded religion and high-quality music with a focus on citizenship drawn from British Idealism; using a cultural movement to seek social change.     

The story of xiao jie ('working' girls)

Abstract

This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be rethought. This conjuncture arose from thinking about culture in the framework of nationalism and the anti‐colonial struggle, and the alignment of women with national culture. I discuss briefly the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture‐gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we're up against, and introduce some new research projects which are trying to take this on board. The focus in these projects is on the question of translation, and how the issue of ‘regional’ languages poses a challenge to prevalent ideas in the women's movement and in feminist teaching. The larger proposition is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to take feminism into the cultural studies classroom of the future.     

Culture change in organizational public discourse 1998–2008: Examining annual reports of Japanese and US corporations

This study examines changes in organizational cultures of Japanese and US corporations between 1998 and 2008 through the lens of communication. Specifically, it analyzes organizational values that are manifest in the use of specific terms in the texts of corporate annual reports (N = 255). By doing so, this study empirically determines the patterns that describe over-time changes in organizational cultures of Japanese and US corporations. Theoretically, this study investigates whether the basic premise of the theory of convergence is applicable to the study of organizational culture change. To that end, three dimensions of organizational values—performance, continuity, and growth—have been derived. To test the hypotheses and the research question offered, this study examines the effects of time in years, national culture, and the interaction between the two on the three value dimensions. Using linear growth model analysis, this study found that time and national culture had significant effects on the use of the terms related to the performance and continuity dimensions. The effects were not significant for the growth dimension. In none of the cases, the interaction effects between time and national culture were significant. The results provided evidence to support the parallel change pattern for the performance and continuity dimensions and the unitary stability pattern for the growth dimension. The findings partially support the premise of the theory of convergence.     

The Impact of External Pressures on an Ethnic Community: The Case of Montréal's Quartier Chinois and Muslim-French Immigrants

This article examines how a community responds to external pressures to adapt culturally to a dominant cultural/political paradigm. Interviews were conducted in Montreal, Canada in 2003 and in France in 2005. In Montreal interviews were conducted among Chinese shopkeepers residing in Montreal's Chinatown, or Quartier Chinois. In France interviews were conducted with Muslims in various ummahs, or Muslim communities in France. The results of the interviews demonstrate that when a minority group is pressured to linguistically, politically, culturally, religiously, and economically adapt to a dominant paradigm that the minority community will respond by closing itself from the dominant culture.     

Convention and Conversion: The Saracen Ending of the Taill of Rauf Coilzear

Uniquely among representatives of the "king-and-commoner" plot type (a king takes refuge with a humble fellow, who is then summoned to court for a reward), the fifteenth-century Taill of Rauf Coilzear adjoins a lengthy encounter between the newly knighted "hero" and a Saracen opponent. The narrative logic of this continuation has resisted explanation. I argue that the inclusion of the Saracen ending and other material derived from popular romance is motivated by the poet's desire to represent Rauf's entry into the nobility not as idle fantasy or as mere absorption, but as an ideal synthesis consistent with his pre-existing code of personal, and class, honour. In his assertive, temperamental otherness Rauf resembles the stock figure of the Saracen champion. The poet builds on this analogy (notably in a scene opposing Rauf to the martial-elitist Roland), so that the eventual conversion of the Saracen - presented conventionally as a matter requiring no ideological reconstruction - supplies the model for Rauf's own decidedly unconventional transition from commoner to aristocrat.     

Conceit and Capacities of the Vulgar Sort: The Social History of English as a Language of Politics

The growth of England from Norman-Angevin colony to imperial power began with the social development of a national community that conducted its arguments in English. In this sense vernacularization was the constituting process of English history. This article connects the history of language to constitutional history, and affirms recent calls for an approach that transcends conventional boundaries between late medieval and early modern periods, and between intellectual, cultural, social, demographic, economic, political and constitutional histories. Vernacularization is seen as a movement from below. It is linked in various ways to traditions and customs of resistance and rebellion that are seen as having shaped the history of England from the thirteenth century to 1649.     

Carrying out research across the arts and humanities and social sciences: developing the methodology for Dementia and Imagination

This paper analyses how the methodological approach for a major Arts and Humanities Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council-funded project entitled Dementia and Imagination ¹1. http://dementiaandimagination.org.uk/View all notes was formulated. This multidisciplinary project brings together the arts and humanities with the social sciences with their different epistemological philosophies and subsequent understandings of research methods. The main objective was to determine how visual arts activities may change, sustain and catalyse community cultures, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours to create dementia-friendly communities. This project involves 6 different UK universities, 14 researchers, 10 formal partners, 7 project artists, 3 research artists and a large number of civil society organisations. The analysis presents a series of themes that have been identified as influencing the approach taken to develop methods which aimed to speak to different audiences in the social sciences, arts and humanities, policy/practice and public domains. It is concluded that a research project of this type needs to embrace a wide variety of epistemological positions if it is to successfully achieve its objectives. This paper contributes to knowledge about how the methodology of large-scale multidisciplinary projects may be constructed which will be of value to those building research consortia across different universities and between universities and community partners.