The Uses and Gratifications of Language in Social Media among the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora in the U.S.

This study examines the uses and gratifications of language in social media among the Indian subcontinental diaspora in the United States, based on data collected from an online survey of 535 adult immigrants following a snowballing technique. Results showed the use of native language is related to the use of home country media, while the use of English language is related to emotional adjustment. This study contributes to the literature on social media, community, and language preference by opening avenues for conducting further research on the usage of language in social media among the Indian subcontinental diaspora in the United States. The findings of this study contribute to an understanding of the influence of social media on language preference.     

Media Usage and Acculturation: Asian Indian Professionals in Silicon Valley*

We examine connections between media use, intergroup contact, and acculturation in 237 Asian Indian professionals in Silicon Valley, drawing on theories of immigrant acculturation, intergroup contact, and media effects. Quality of host contact positively predicted acculturation. Indian (ethnic) media consumption negatively predicted acculturation, and American (host) media consumption was positively related to acculturation. Ethnic television viewing exacerbated the effects of negative intergroup contact on acculturation. Respondents used social networking websites to maintain both host and ethnic ties. Host cultural/informational capital was positively related to acculturation. Host media consumption was positively related to political engagement and loneliness.     

Latino Portrayals in Local News Media: Underrepresentation,Negative Stereotypes,and Institutional Predictors of Coverage

Given the rise in negative rhetoric about Latinos in the U.S., it is essential to examine whether this negative tone extends to general, local news as well. An analysis of 2426 news articles drawn from 55 local newspapers in 2015 reveals several important findings. First, despite the intense spotlight on Latinos, they are still underrepresented in local news media. Relative to the other ethnic groups and whites, Latinos are more likely to be portrayed through negative stereotypes. However, the probability of this negative coverage is smaller for news media with a big proportion of Latino audiences, or for publicly-owned media outlets.     

Literacy as social (media) practice: Refugee youth and native language literacy at school

Research indicates that immigrant and refugee students benefit from use of their native languages in education. Nevertheless, what this means in practice has infrequently been examined by researchers, and teachers often struggle to find ways to use their refugee students’ native languages as resources that encourage the development of the native languages as well as academic language and literacy in the new language. This small-scale, exploratory project employed an innovative, five-day critical media literacy curricular unit, and then examined how it served as a context for native language and English literacy development. Participants were 14 adolescent newcomers to the U.S. from Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia, all speakers of Somali with limited or interrupted formal schooling experiences. Participants had varying but mostly beginning levels of print literacy skills; yet as recent migrants, most used social media to interact with others locally and globally, in multiple languages, oral and written. As described here, our efforts to foster peer-to-peer Somali language communication resulted in multilingual interaction across a range of social and academic purposes in the classroom. These research findings highlight how in-class use of social media analysis can serve to achieve multilingual and (critical) literacy learning aims.     

Media and criticism in China: The case of the “cultural revolution”

This paper analyzes the role of the media in China during the cultural revolution 1966–1976. In particular, the authors examine the two elements that contributed to the ease with which the “Gang of Four” subverted the media to their own political ends. They contend that the media's history and culture were the two principal elements which allowed the “Gang of Four” to usurp both media and state power. Criticism represented a special cultural genre that established the legitimacy of one group to remove another from power. The authors demonstrate the inherent possibility of usurpation of the media when truth is dominated by personality.     

Scripting a Tragedy: The "Isaac and Ishmael" Episode of The West Wing as Parable

Following the events of September 11, 2001, most of the entertainment industry was trying to avoid references to violence and terrorism. During this time, however, Aaron Sorkin wrote and produced a special episode of the series The West Wing, which was broadcast 3 weeks after the attacks. The broadcast of this program-titled "Isaac and Ishmael"-was met with a decidedly captious critical reaction. We suggest that this episode can be productively viewed as a parable-designed to provoke an audience toward introspective thought rather than easy answers. We speculate that, although this program may have been broadcast to an audience that was not ready to accept its message, the form of the parable presents interesting possibilities for network television programming.     

The Sword and the Sun: The Old World Drought Atlas as a Source for Medieval Mediterranean History

The release of the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) in November 2015 provides historians with an unprecedented glimpse into the climate of the medieval world. Through the careful examination of tree-ring data provided by the OWDA, historians can better gauge how the environment affected the course of medieval Mediterranean history, particularly in times and places where textual data is sparse, such as North Africa. The case studies of the Norman conquest of the coast of Ifrīqiyya in the 1140s and the invasion by the Banū Hilāl in the mid-eleventh century show the utility of the OWDA for gaining a better understanding the medieval Mediterranean. In particular, OWDA data shows that the arrival of the Banū Hilāl into Ifrīqiyya coincided with a period of extended drought that is not documented in the written sources and suggests that increased competition for scarce resources was instrumental to their entrance into the region.     

Not as a Stranger: Rooting for the Home Team in Invictus and The Infidel

Two recent movies, Invictus and The Infidel, concern finding ways to negotiate coexistence between intensely opposed subcultures and are used to expand the meaning of multiculturalism. New, emergent cultures that are universalistic, practical, and accommodative are among the many cultures that are given place amid the diversity of modern complex societies. Although purity of culture is often held up as a goal, the blending of cultures in search of daily survival and convenience remains valuable to modern people looking to define their identities.     

Social network sites and acculturation of international sojourners in the Netherlands: The mediating role of psychological alienation and online social support

Acculturation of short-term international sojourners, such as expats and international students, has received considerable attention from scholars in the past decades. Acculturation is commonly defined as the interplay between cultural maintenance, the sojourner’s desire to maintain their home culture identity, and host country participation, their desire to initiate contact with members of the host society. The present paper focuses on the role that Social Network Sites (SNS) play in the acculturation process of this group. Through a survey, we examined how 126 short-term sojourners in the Netherlands use SNS to interact with relations in both home and host country, and how this affects their cultural maintenance and host country participation. Furthermore, we examined psychological alienation and online social support as possible mediators. Our results show that on the one hand SNS contact with home country relations is positively related to online social support. On the other hand, it is also related to psychological alienation, which in turn is related to cultural maintenance. This shows that sojourners who keep in touch with friends and family at home also experience more loneliness and homesickness, and place more emphasis on their own cultural heritage. Finally, we found that SNS contact with host country relations predicts host country participation. Through online activities, sojourners are able to foster social interaction and strengthen friendships with locals.     

Biculturalism as a double-edged sword: The perspectives of Mexican American emerging adults

Cultural and ethnic identity research largely highlights the adaptiveness of biculturalism among Latino youth in the United States. Less is known about how Latino youth themselves define and experience biculturalism, the cultural identity content that they deem relevant, and how heritage and host identities intersect. Using an inductive approach, this study examines the salience, valence, and meaning of biculturalism among Latino youth living in a multicultural U.S. city. Twenty-six Mexican American emerging adults (M_age = 22.35 years) participated in semi-structured interviews and constructed cultural identity maps focusing on their experiences of biculturalism. Qualitative analysis reveals that participants overwhelmingly deem biculturalism to be positive and explores the duality (i.e.: opposition or contrast) that lies beneath that positivity. Participants emphasized individual-level advantages of biculturalism, namely, that their Mexican heritage provides identity rootedness and enables expanded career and educational opportunities. The bicultural challenges that participants discussed were overwhelmingly relational: familial cultural gaps due to dissonant values and critical gazes from others due to inadequate cultural performances. By revealing that and why biculturalism is mostly positive in the eyes of participants, and exploring the duality that lies beneath that positivity, this study draws attention to the complexity of biculturalism that can be obscured by exclusive reliance on quantitative self-report measures.     

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.     

The measure of all things: on the use of time as a value indicator in arts impact assessment

Like money, time is a scarce resource. People used to economizing with one are likely to economize with the other. This proposition has serious implications for cultural economics (as for economics generally); three in particular are explored here. (1) Because cultural values are learned, and learning takes time, from the sorts of learning experience to which people have committed time in the past much can be inferred about their probable cultural consumption behaviour in future and about their attitudes to art. (2) The arts deliver socio-economic impact by encouraging new forms of belief – altering people's values essentially. Beliefs then influence action. Impact assessors must confront the question of value generation head on. (3) Use of time indicators will enable assessors to capture and quantify impacts which barely register on the usual money-economic scale, generating new categories of evidence directly if unconventionally relevant to cultural policy debate. The discussion is situated in historical context, drawing attention to a rich tradition of time-reflexive thinking within professional economics. The assumption underlying much of modern, purposely “neoclassical” cultural economics – that cultural value can best be measured in terms of willingness to pay or willingness to be paid money – is not strictly necessary either in economic theory or in economic practice, and for impact assessment purposes it is not always helpful. Sections following the historical introduction take careful account of recent developments in cultural economics, and to facilitate further reading frequently refer to the summative handbooks edited by Ruth Towse (2003) and Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby (2006).     

The Jews of Venetian Candia: The Challenges of External Influences and Internal Diversity as Reflected in Takkanot Kandiyah

Takkanot Kandiyah is a collection of Hebrew-written legislative texts regarding the leadership of the Jewish community of Candia, the capital of the Venetian colony of Crete, which were issued by successive generations of communal leaders between the early thirteenth and late sixteenth centuries. The detailed information it provides on many areas of the communal life makes Takkanot Kandiyah a valuable source for historical research into Jewish life in the medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean. Through a study of the texts contained in Takkanot Kandiyah, this article attempts to identify and analyse the ways in which the leadership of the Candiot community responded to the challenges of coexistence with the Greek inhabitants of Crete and the Venetian rulers of the island, as well as with the Jewish immigrants whom the currents of history brought to Crete from various corners of the Mediterranean, and thus to examine the importance of the “Mediterranean dimension” of the life of Cretan Jewry.